Paula Zvane

Patchouli scented mudbath

Paula Zvane, Victoria Bjork, Kamile Pikelyte

Patchouli scented mudbath is an immersive exhibition, including performances, that explares the rituals, failures, and absurdities of self-maintenance in post-wellness age. Unfolding as a dystopian spa - both sanctuary and site of surrender - the exhibition entangles the promise of purificationin layers of performance, decay, and transformation. The installation brings together sculptural works by Victoria Bjork, Kamile Pikelyte, and Paula Zvane, forming an alien environment that blurs care with contamination, comfort with discomfort.

Within this space, cleanliness becomes suspicious, filth becomes tender, and care takes on fereal form. Drawing from traditions of spiritual bathing, mud therapy, and speculating about wellness industry designs, Patchouli scented mudbath constructs a liminal terrain where care is both sacred and corrupted. The patchouli-scented mud functions as both medium and message - a site of healing and haunting.

The artists explore the cyclical natue of cleanliness and dirt, care and decay, and how these opposing forces intertwine physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Through sculpture and performance, they examine the gestures we perform to maintain or purify - through bodily ritual, domestic habit, or emotional shedding. Here, dirt is not residue but a transformative agent: a material of memory, intinct, and change. In this spa, the only detox is surrender.

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)