The Institute of Anxiety Bed with Tomáš Pospiszyl
Live stream from the residency apartment of the Goethe-Institut in Prague
Sunday 27 May, from 8pm to falling asleep
@ www.institutuzkosti.cz
The event will be held in Czech
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The Institute of Anxiety (IA) Bed is a real standard-sized bed (40 x 200 x 180 cm) with bedding and a mattress in good condition. While other beds are slept in, the IA Bed becomes a stage and a platform for a speaker, performer, or storyteller. It provides a space to lie around for those who are willing, at the expense of sleep, to share their findings, opinions, and visions and talk and hallucinate at the border of wakefulness and sleep. The night guests can take us to areas we would never look into ourselves. They will prepare traps for our bodies that we will overcome without any after-effects or tiredness the next day. The IA Bed is a faithful and tenacious companion for those who cannot fall asleep or work while we sleep, or seek freedom during the night for those who have gotten stuck in the gears of the system. It doesn’t verify the truthfulness of the stories; it collects utopian scenarios, dreams, and visions. A closely familiar, soft and intimate place of rest and regenerative dreaming can very quickly become a space for political demands. It will enable those to whom it provides accommodation to share their experiences with various forms of anxiety, or straight out chase them away. It will help those who are listening endure part of the night together.

You can watch the IA Bed’s program on Thursday and Sunday evenings in May starting at 8 pm at www.institutuzkosti.cz. The length of the program depends on the endurance of the invited guest.

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The Institute of Anxiety creates a space for the study of anxiety, which is spreading throughout society and manifests itself through insomnia, stress, alienation, loss of empathy, inequalities, and violence. It is suppressed without success by products of the pharmaceutical industry and intensified by growing social and economic uncertainty. The institute aims to be a platform where anxiety communicates and opens itself to a potential solution and turns into a force that is capable of radicalizing and forcing structural changes in the current state of affairs.

The Institute of Anxiety was founded by Zuzana Blochová, Edith Jeřábková, Barbora Kleinhamplová, and Eva Koťátková. Its institutional homes for 2018 are the Goethe-Institut in Prague and the organization Are.