RETREAT (hospital life) is an artistic research project that examines the hospital as a space of withdrawal, reflection, and potential social imagination. Grounded in the artist’s lived experience of chronic illness and long-term hospitalisation following a bilateral lung transplant, the project approaches illness as a condition that creates distance from everyday life and opens a critical perspective on personal, social, and political structures. Drawing on Buddhist retreat practices and ideas of retreat as political action, the research explores hospitals as sites of care, discipline, and possibility. Through archival research, interviews, and site visits – from sanatoriums to experimental architectural models – the project speculates on the hospital as a prototype for alternative forms of collective life. The research will inform the development of a future performance work combining text, music, and installation.
Moosje M. Goosen is a Rotterdam-based writer and artist-researcher whose interdisciplinary practice explores chronic illness, language, and forms of care across artistic and theoretical contexts.
