No Cure? Caring for Burnout in a Neoliberal Age
2019

“Architecture, urbanism, and design, have always been affected by anxieties and obsessions with health.

Today’s hyper-efficient cities are the breeding grounds for burnout, the chronic illness of our time. Infected by neoliberal attitudes, contemporary minds operate at speeds beyond the biological body. Burnout can thus be defined as the destruction of the biological body in its adaptation to the enhanced mind. Acknowledging the impossibility of retreat, this thesis proposes an Apothecary Grave-Garden for victims of burnout in a still functioning urban cemetery, taking the issue of health from individual responsibility and restoring it more appropriately to our social surroundings — a reminder to embrace slowness and inefficiencies in a Neoliberal Age.”

7.2 x 6.5 ft / 220 x 200 cm
mixed media, acrylic, ink, dirt, collage, analogue & digital

Charles Goodwin Sands Thesis Medal