Uprooting Ill Health I: On burnout and the mental health of farmers

Free admission

Uprooting Ill Health I. is a discursive program focused on mental health and burnout, held in the afternoon of June 29 in the shade of the trees on the grounds of the Bohnice Psychiatric Hospital, followed by a concert in the V. kolona café.

14:00 Plunging Hands into the Earth – gardening session with the Institute of Anxiety
16:00 Conversation between Apolena Rychlíková and Tomáš Uhnák about the mental health of farmers
17:30 Lecture by Hannah Proctor about her book Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat
19:00 Concert by Petr Kolárčik & friend

The event zooms in on the political economy of health – the ways how bodies grow sick and exhausted under the contemporary conditions of capitalism. What is the political context that enables exorbitantly expensive treatments, medications, and therapies, and why is health becoming a commodity? As many health and crip activists demand full access to health, we wonder how ill health can become a common ground from which to struggle against exploitation. How can someone unhealthy and exhausted organize, strike, and resist? The event is split into two parts. This first part focuses on mental health – particularly burnout and depression, which are proliferating under late capitalism. Institute of Anxiety invites visitors of the event to literally plunge their hands into the earth and help the Institute take care of flower beds and do some weeding, watering or mulching. As they put it, “Putting hands into the dirt, grounds you”. Institute of Anxiety will also introduce the context of their garden and their practice.

The event is organized by the Biennale Matter of Art in collaboration with the Institute of Anxiety.