Pascal Chabot

Burning Out

Burning Out is literally a drama about life and death. For two years, the Belgian director Jérôme le Maire followed the members of a surgical unit in one of the biggest hospitals in Paris. Constantly under severe stress, understaffed and subject to severe budget cuts, employees fight each other for resources. Meanwhile the management imposes ever more stringent efficiency and profitability targets. All over Europe burnout has reached epidemic proportions among employees in the public and private sectors. Will we end up killing ourselves? Or will we be able to find meaning and joy at work?

Simondon of the Desert

French philosopher of technology Gilbert Simondon (1924-1989) is perhaps most well known for his creation of a set of concepts in the 1960s that describe our modern world and that, at the time, illustrated a vision of a growing alliance between technology and nature. Throughout his life, Simondon was studied by some prominent thinkers (among them Gilles Deleuze) but still his singular philosophy remained rather unacknowledged. Since then, however, his work has been widely circulated around the globe, and has even gone beyond the field of philosophy, having a great resonance within many disciplines, recently including the fields of media and visual culture.