RestRoom
Project details
- Year
- 2023
- Programme
- Bachelor – Photography
- Practices
- Honours Programme
- Minor
- Visual Culture
Let us put our camera weaponry down. We are tired. We have seen enough. We have seen too much. We are oversaturated and overstimulated creating a culture of More and Never Enough. Let us be challenged to do nothing. To rest. To get reacquainted with our eyelids. To dream and relax. To feel and let go.
Manifesto for Rest
“RestRoom, A Public Space for Rest” by Mariska Mulder is a thesis with the word colouring of a manifesto. An activistic project that invites you to choose rest and challenges you to dream. No spoilers here, you’ll know what the RestRoom looks like once you enter it. Rest is a human necessity. Rest is always yours. Let me introduce you to my thesis with an excerpt of a particular time in my life when that notion wasn’t exactly known to me.
Less is more.
That’s what my period of long covid has taught me. After I had dropped sick with exhaustion, I spent some time in disbelief. I felt betrayed by my own body. I was 25 years old! This should have been a blip to me, much like I witnessed it being that to all my peers. Why was this happening to me? Was I not healthy enough? Did I have underlying conditions? (Yes, I did.) I had a hard time accepting that I was sick and as a result of the shame and anger I felt towards the lack of capabilities of my body, I pushed myself to my limits.
I underestimated my body’s need for rest and that’s how I ended up having the worst overstimulated induced panic attack in my life, sitting on the Markthal benches by the Albert Heijn. I was scared. I felt woozy. My friend had brought me food and a fruit drink. I clung to these items like a lifeline. Looking around hurt. The light hurt. There was too much noise and people milling around with kids. Talking, laughing, arguing. My direct view of the escalators gave me motion sickness. I felt too weak to stand but we moved outside anyway. This was better but so bright. It made me nauseous. I wanted to flee but all safe options seemed too far away. I felt trapped. I just wanted comfort. To sigh in relief.
And isn’t that a core need? To feel safe. To trust that your environment can hold you where you are? To not be suspended by your own fate? The unsafety I experienced made such an impact that I struggled to leave my house for several months.
As I recovered and learned to set my own pace and accepted my limitations, I reflected on how different this situation could have been, had there been an accessible place for me to decompress. But there wasn’t. So.
Why is there no physical space for rest in public? And in what ways might it be important in our collective cultivation of community care?
Are you ready to find out?