Patchouli Scented Mudbath
Entering a space between sanctuary and discomfort, between spa ritual and purgatory. Here, relaxation is not a choice but a demand forced, collective, and uneasy. The familiar language of self-care is unsettled, displaced into the mud, where the body’s contact with the dirt becomes contradictory: both healing and unresolved.
This is not the spa of luxury but of necessity: a “hurting spa,” where comfort arises only through discomfort, and relaxation is bound to unease. Growth requires an embrace of fate, even in its ugliest forms. Flowers may emerge from the mud, but they remain muddy, fragile, and marked by their origin. Mud is not simply a matter, but a threshold between care and punishment, spa ritual and bad accident. The figures do not wash themselves clean but remain in contradiction, attempting to find fleeting moments of rest amid circumstances that are unpredictable and uncontrollable.
The viewers are invited to inhabit this paradox, to consider whether safety is ever more than an illusion, whether healing demands confrontation with the very substances we reject, and whether beauty must sometimes remain uncomfortable in order to remain true.
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In A Thousand Plateaus (1980), they describe “deterritorialization” being displaced from zones of safety, yet forced to invent new ways of inhabiting space. Relaxation in discomfort could be read as a minor “reterritorialization”: making a provisional, fragile form of rest within instability.
“To relax in horror is to deterritorialize comfort: to make a fragile zone of rest inside the very materials that deny it.” (Deleuze & Guattari)
