2024 Finalists

“Will it ever go back to how it was?”

A tired young executive finds himself reeling from a burnout. His life is not simply surrounded, but defined by stress. He is responsible for running multiple companies and consults some of the biggest organizations in the country. His head has been widely overused as a tool of corporate idea generation, and it has been running at full tilt for the better part of a decade. He is constantly sick, but takes no sick days, he is constantly working, yet work is not always laborious for him. He is present in body yet absent through other thoughts and dealings.

To take a perspective from Byung-Chul Han’s “Burnout Society”, he is the modern interpretation of the myth of Prometheus. Han argues that a contemporary view of Prometheus is that of a figure at war with itself. That in an achievement society, modern individuals have internalized the role of both master and slave, exploiting themselves in pursuit of achievement. That the eagle is no longer a subject outside the hero, but is now an alter ego, enacting the self-punishment that fuels the fire of modern success and leaves chronic trauma in its ashes.

“Will it ever go back to how it was?”

What the burnout is to the mind, the wildfire is to an ecosystem, and both are a by-product of an achievement society. In 2022, 330 mln. hectares of forests, savannahs and grasslands burned down due to natural or, increasingly, man-made causes. While some wildfires are actually good for an ecosystem, as species have come to adapt to them over thousands of years, most of them just erase everything in their wake, releasing millions of tons of carbon stored in plants back into the atmosphere.

In parallel to the wildfires, and caused by a similar worsening of our environment, is the epidemic of the wildfires of the mind. Created by the growing pollution of our mental space, with toxic media fumes igniting negativity, life expectations inflating via the overproduction of aspirational social content and the working climate ever warming to exert more stress on the corporate fauna. Mental burnout is on the rise, with every second working personreporting having experienced the condition.

“Will it ever go back to how it was?”

And should it? Perhaps taming these fires, both literal and metaphorical, requires embracing their dual creative and devastating nature, as Heraclitus did. He saw fire as the universe’s fundamental element, symbolizing perpetual change. To capture this concept, I applied uninhibited layers of spray paint, a medium which to me embodies spontaneity and unpredictability. This way of painting required swift movements and relinquishing control over the picture to the paint itself, just as the fires it is meant to depict. The painting is part of a broader series of movement based paintings that experiment with the interaction between motion and paint, inspired by, among many, the spray-gun works of Katharina Grosse

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