Stress relief room

This room is a place where one can take his or her anger out in an entirely violent and brutal fashion without harming anyone else. In order to achieve this goal, 2 boxing sacs (1 big & 1 small) were installed, as well as big boxing gloves were provided for the safety of the user.

It all started as a spontaneous decision of picking up what it seemed to be a big abandoned boxing sack, from one of the basements’ floor. I thought someone is going to spam about this the next days, and we, Sammy and I would have to return it to its rightful owner. Since nobody did it, ideas started kicking in, and soon enough, Sammy hanged the sack in one of the empty rooms from C basement. By that time, however, I had no idea of the whole project that was emerging, and also no idea about how popular this place will become. I just wanted something I could hit as much as I could and as hard as I could, releasing the tension resulting from too much homework and study, and all the anger connected with my crappy grades and implicitly with the people who were behind all these, namely professors, TAs, etc.

Sammy had a different perspective. He envisioned having a nice room, with graffiti decorated walls, armchairs one could rest into, and also other things to hit besides the boxing sack. Slowly, this vision is starting to become reality, and its impact on the society is quite big for such a low cost project. Late at night, one can find various students releasing the tension so that a new day can come and go quietly. There are still a lot of things still to be improved, for example the walls still need to be decorated, and this way, I ask anybody who is interested for a place to display his/her work as a graffiti artist, to contact the Mercator College Office team and to ask for one of the many blank places of the walls of the stress relief room.

Text by Mihai Voica