2023 | United States | Fiction

Spa Sybarite

  • English 3 mins
  • Director | Joshua Ashish Dawson

STATUS: Released

This film is currently not available.   

Published in 2009, the first Lancet Climate Change Commission's concluding remark was simple, albeit potent… “Climate change is the biggest global health threat of the 21st century.”

“The World health organization states that “Although it is unequivocal that climate change affects human health, it remains challenging to accurately estimate the scale and impact of many climate-sensitive health risks. In the short- to medium-term, the health impacts of climate change will be determined mainly by the vulnerability of populations, their resilience to the current rate of climate change, and the extent and pace of adaptation.”

But what happens in the long term when adapting to climate change will simply get harder at which point our bodies are unable to cope with the impact of the environment’s hostility?

With the wellness industry now being one of the world’s fastest, most resilient markets, outranking the pharmaceutical industry several times over, it’s easy to see wellness, not healthcare, becoming the clear & present winners of the climate change business providing coping with climate-anxiety an emerging market to profit off of. The International Finance Corporation posits that the “Climate Investment Opportunities” will total $23 Trillion in Emerging Markets by 2030.

When you have a total addressable market of the entire planet, the climate crisis provides a perfect excuse to make every business a climate business. The treatments themselves that are featured in the project are not science fiction, but present-day reality. Bathing complexes, IV therapy, nutrition-specific hydroponic systems, and Immersive virtual reality caves are all popular technologies today, which the project packages and rebrands as “climate-specific treatment”.

By shedding light on disaster capitalism, where companies use a crisis like climate change as an opportunity for profit, exclusive Climate Spas like Spa Sybarite are an example of a cautionary architectural typology that is imminent. It is a form of critical architecture that is meant to render and highlight a plausible scenario to provoke and instigate thought on the impact of climate change on health and wellness as well as their corresponding industries.”

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