*Clean Girl is an interactive installation by Swedish Girls and Schaum, presented during Vienna Design Week 2026.* 

The project draws on the familiar, ordinary, everyday gestures that usually go unnoticed, and shifts them into a new context. At its core is the question of how intimacy can emerge within public and shared spaces. Clean Girl offers an invitation, a place to pause, to gather, and participate in a collective ritual. 

The installation takes the form of a fountain surrounded by columns of soap, rising from the ground. The shape of the material imitates the flow of water and the soap pedestals will showcase the traces of interaction over time. 

Washing one's hands is among the most familiar of human actions. Private, repetitive, almost invisible in daily life. Clean Girl relocates this gesture into public space, transforming it from habit into performance. 

The name Clean Girl refers to the contemporary obsession with beauty and wellbeing, where being “clean” has become a status symbol and a marker of a certain lifestyle. These ideals are shaped and commodified by capitalism, often using women and their bodies to promote and sell them. By bringing the concept into public space, Clean Girl takes something associated with individual self-care and status and turns it into something shared and accessible. 

The fountain and its columns are realized in collaboration with Austrian manufacturers, while the soap itself is produced together with Austria's oldest soap factory, Walde Seifen.