Rest is a vital practice for good health. It has anti-inflammatory effects and helps alleviate chronic pain, high blood pressure and burnout. However, for rest to work its magic, it matters not only how we rest, but also where we do so.

In Never Rest, Angela Alves explores the spatial limits of rest. She asks whether rest is even possible in work and healthcare spaces characterized by pressure, control and expectations.

Conceived as a guided tour, she leads the audience through the rooms of Sophiensæle on a historical quest for traces of non-rest: from the Eastern European laborers of the Nazi regime, who were forced to work and sleep in what is now Sophiensæle’s Festsaal in the 1940s, to the sleepless nights of dancers in the theater, to the long-term bath patients of the sanatoriums and nursing homes of early modernism, who had to find rest in the bathtub and sometimes even spend the night there.