SANATORIUM
Ongoing research, 2024 -
I still remember the strange atmosphere of spirituality and unfamiliarity in these places, withbarred windows and an owl passing the time sitting on a branch. Te peculiar smell – outsideand inside the buildings. Te smell of mountain air with a high content of iodine and essentialoils from nearby forests. Inside, this smell mixed with the smell of the old building, chemicalsused for cleaning, and medical substances.
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As a child, I spent six stays of five to six weeks each in sanatoriums, and these experiences prompted me to revisit my own memories, which now inform an autotheoretical approach to this research.
This is an ongoing inquiry in which I focus on, on the one hand, landscapes of ex-traction, and on the other, places recognized as healing environments or reservoirs
of curative properties. I study them from both ecological and socio-political perspec-tives, treating such sites as condensations of human and non-human presence, as
well as destinations for tourists seeking ways to cope with surrounding realities.
This project marked the beginning of my artistic research into tourism, the extractiv-ism of environments and bodies for human comfort, forms of contemporary rituality,
and spatial practices of healing. Through the lens of childhood memory and thearchitectural, social, and political history of sanatoriums in Eastern Europe, I began to
investigate how therapeutic environments intersect with collective practices, ideolo-gy, and spatial habits.