‘Mud Soap Bubbles’ departs from a passage from chapter 6 of ‘The Day of the Triffids’, the dystopian novel by John Whyndam.


John Wyndham frames the episode as a confrontation. On the one side, a crowd, and a man arguing that the many, who have gone blind, should be supported, helped to find food and to live.
On the other side of the gate, the few, who escaped harm, adamant that their own best chances of survival depend on keeping out this caravan of vulnerables and abandon them to their abject fate.
We watch the unfolding scene through the eyes of the two protagonists who observe from a short, seemingly safe, distance. And do not intervene.
We witness the anger, the fear, the tensions, the gunshots.
As readers, spectators, viewers, gallery visitors, the horrors of this world alter into an experiential dramatic device with which we can simultaneously bring our repulsion and radical dissent to the boil, and reconcile ourselves with our rational inaction.

Text by Pierre Coinde