For the leisure of working insects

For the Leisure of Working Insects transforms luxury architectures of consumption into leisure spaces for insects. Using humour and irony, the project exposes the absurdity of contemporary leisure culture, where even rest becomes another form of labour.

There are all kinds of places for entertainment where work and suffering seem to be forgotten. These oases promise absolute happiness, but in their essence they reveal an emptiness determined by the loop of capitalism: our free time becomes a second job where we spend the money earned in the first one.

At the centre of this wheel are the great metropolises, which compete to build ‘the tallest building’, ‘the shopping mall with the most shops’.... These grandiose ideas are sculpted in an architecture that is as exaggerated as it is desirable. For the leisure of working insects proposes to transform these spaces to imagine a leisure architecture for insects. Focusing on a type of entertainment built on nature but far from the natural, in places where it is necessary to pay in order to enjoy, the project proposes scenarios where we could imagine an ant disconnecting after a day's work.

Through the decontextualisation of these architectures, the project confronts the laughter and strangeness of a shopping centre for insects with the desire for luxury that this same space built for us produces. By using irony as an analytical tool, the tragic ridiculousness of a panorama saturated with leisure, stimuli and artifice that inevitably lead us to an existential abyss becomes evident. In this project, insects are a tiny but forceful reflection of our society: on the one hand, tireless workers; on the other, indifferent witnesses of the landscape transformed by our excessive ambition.