THE SAUNA SYMPOSIUM
Olivia Boudreau, still from L’Étuve, 2011.Image courtesy of the artist and the collection of the Musée d’Art
Contemporain de Montréal
THE SAUNA SYMPOSIUM
Saturday, November 1, 2014
At Hart House Farm, Caledon Hills
Presented by C Magazine, the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery at the
University of Toronto and the Hart House Farm Committee.
The Sauna Symposium was held in and around a traditional Finnish log sauna at Hart House Farm, a 150-acre property in rural Caledon Ontario. Throughout the day, experienced sauna practitioners and artists hosted sessions in the sauna that activate the culture and history of the sauna and propose new modes of aesthetic and cultural engagement through communal bathing. Additional activities led by artist-naturalists, including walks in the surrounding forest, explored other ways of engaging the landscape. The Sauna Symposium was a queer-friendly, trans* inclusive event that involved some nudity and all participants were encouraged to participate according to their personal comfort level
Fred Thompson: Elements of the Sauna
Architect, writer, and experienced sauna practitioner, Fred Thompson, led a session discussing and applying the elements of the Finnish sauna. Fred Thompson is Professor Emeritus in the School of Architecture at the University of Waterloo. He has written extensively about the relationship between ritual and space in Western and non-Western culture, including the book Ritual and Space (University of Waterloo Press: 1988) and has been a visiting professor at Helsinki University of Technology, Finland; Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, New York, the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, and the Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen.
Christie Pearson and Marcus Boon: HOT/COLD/HOT
Artist, architect and community activist Christie Pearson and writer and scholar Marcus Boon hosted a classic six-part sauna/pond session and an open discussion about immersive vibratory environments. Christie Pearson is a writer, architect and artist who creates bathing-based installations and performances. She is a founding member of Thewaves sound and water events, Scapegoat Journal: Architecture, Landscape, Political Economy, Urbanvessel performance collective and The Wade Collective for art in public pools. She is currently writing The Architecture of Bathing. Marcus Boon is a writer and journalist. He teaches in the Departments of English and Social & Political Thought at York University and is currently writing a book about the politics of vibration and its engagement by contemporary subcultures and avant-garde movements.
Jamie Ross: Steam Spell
Montreal-based artist and witch, Jamie Ross, led a time-honoured bathhouse ritual of the Radical Faeries, linking the saunas of the Radical Faerie communes throughout North America to the Toronto Bathhouse Raids of 1981 as queer ur-place and primordial ritual setting. Jamie Ross is an artist whose practice centres on magic and queer community, with a particular interest in rural Canadian history.
VSVSVS: Water Carriers
In the spirit of the pleasure of a cool douse of water mid-sauna, or post-sauna, or in general, VSVSVS made personal dunk tanks for sauna attendees. There was a small assortment of varied portable dunkers, to suit peoples’ preferred cold-water delivery method. VSVSVS is a seven-person collective and artist-run centre based out of a warehouse in the portlands of Toronto.
FOREST PROJECTS
Deirdre Fraser-Gudrunas: Plant Walk
Professional forager Deirdre Fraser-Gudrunas led a plant walk that covered wild edible plants and their uses, local food politics, the connection between plants, agency and eating, and what it means to find your own food. Fraser-Gudrunas is a professional forager and sometimes chef whose business, Vibrant Matter, supplies Toronto's top restaurants with wild foods.
Gina Badger and Diane Borsato: Two Infusions
Using plants harvested from Hart House Farm, Gina Badger and Diane Borsato served two infusions—one warm and grounding, and the other cool and elevating—to participants before and after the women-and-trans sauna session. Gina Badger is a writer and artist whose practice employs listening, walking, gardening and cooking and explores the time and material of colonial ecologies from a critical settler perspective. Diane Borsato is a visual artist working in performance, intervention, video, installation, and photography, and a certified tea sommelier.
Presented in conjunction with C Magazine The WET Issue 123
The WET issue number 123 of C Magazine features Christie Pearson in conversation with Leonard Koren, writer and publisher of WET: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing, the infamous avant-garde art and counterculture magazine from which this issue derives its theme. Feature essays also include Jen Hutton writing about Ed Ruscha’s Liquid Paintings, and Noa Bronstein on Olivia Boudreau’s video installation works set in bathtubs and steam rooms. With artist projects by Dayna McLeod and Andrew Harwood, and columns by Mieke Chew, Peter Morin and RM Vaughan, as well as photographs of wet places submitted by our readers.