During a residency with the Medina Triennial in Western New York, preparing Floating Garden to launch on the Erie Canal in 2026, I spent time this past fall fall re-reading Robert Burton's tome, Anatomy of Melancholy, to write this piece for the Brooklyn Rail.
It begins:
Dear fellow sufferers,
Why, in this moment of compressed time and a feeling of vertigo, do I dwell in the dense pages of a seventeenth-century compendium of sadness? If it is, in part, to turn away from the day’s edicts, it is also to begin to come to terms with an agony I try to bury, and one that surfaces, more insistently, among people I love. Robert Burton’s taxonomy gives me a language for both psychic weather and civic climates that choreograph appearance, lingering, and withdrawal.
and continues:
While relying on Hippocratic notions of four humors and temperaments, and on Aristotle’s understanding of mesotēs—the balance of opposite energies—Burton recognizes a humoral theory that is already spatial: bodies and climates leak into one another; temperament is co-produced by architecture, weather, and labor. If melancholy is perennial, then our task (yours and mine) is to imagine a civic temperament that can meet it: a choreography of a humoral city that absorbs melancholic states instead of exiling them to the clinic or to the screen.
If there were a missing fourth partition, a set of cures for a community or city, I would ask with you: Where can devotion be embodied without coercion? Where can publics cultivate rituals of mutual recognition? When gathering in public narrows, how might architectures and programs lengthen our breath? For a contemporary reader, my invitation is to translate medieval cures into a curatorial langue for civic life, an index of what a body politic needs to stay balanced and flexible. The humoral city understands space as an active participant in psychic equilibrium, capable of aggravating or easing melancholic states.
If you're interested in reading more of my thoughts on the city in a time of crisis, Download the full PDF here