How do you make an outdoor sauna even better? Add art

If you know, you know. As winter activities go, there are few as invigorating and delicious as holing up in an outdoor sauna, emerging every 15 minutes or so to be chilled by the cold — or better yet, dunked in a tub of ice water. It may sound uncomfortable. Awful even. What could convince someone to sit around in an 80-degree sweatbox, potentially crammed in with a bunch of clammy strangers? But if that's your gut reaction, I suspect you've never tried it.

"You know, people go with an attitude of doubt and uncertainty to really becoming converts. I mean, I know that's what happened to me," says Rui Pimenta, one half of Art Spin, the Toronto-based curatorial team he co-leads with Layne Hinton. And the duo's latest project could make sauna-addicts of us all, while offering a totally unique way to experience art.

Beginning March 15, Art Spin will open the doors to Public Sweat. It's a pop-up experience that will be happening on the grounds of the Harbourfront Centre through April 23, an event combining contemporary art, music — and sauna, of course.

For the price of admission ($35 for a regular ticket), visitors have two hours to enjoy the space, which includes an indoor lounge that'll function as a hub of art and leisure: view photography by Ruth Kaplan and Jussi Puikkonen, video art by Kenneth Bamberg and Wrik Mead. Snack on snacks from the cafe; shop the shop — which will be stocked with a book of essays on sauna-culture, a publication specially commissioned for the event. On Thursdays, a rotating line-up of artists will be leading sound baths; The Music Gallery has programmed further performances for April 12-14, and more live events are TBA. 

But the main attraction has got to be the sweat-bathing. That'll be happening outside in five unique structures: functioning saunas designed by artists and built to bring the heat. 

Among the sauna projects, you can sweat it out in #VOLCANO_LOV3R, a barrel sauna that's been given a colourful makeover by the FASTWÜRMS artist collective. Abandoned Splendor by Simone Jones lets you steam along to an original soundscape composed by Mitchell Akiyama. Garmabeh, per its title, is a take on an Iranian bath house; that one's by Reza Nik and Connor Stevens's art studio, SHEEEP. Upon entering Christie Pearson's Geospheric Sweatbath, visitors will be invited to feel more than just the heat; if you splay out on her sauna's granite floor, you'll experience a feature described as a vibrating "kinetic intervention," an element designed by collaborating artist Rob Cruickshank. Mobile Sweat by Chris Foster is a repurposed trailer: a wood-fired sauna on-the-go that's been modded to include a home theatre system. It'll be screening video works by a rotating roster of artists including Alex McLeod and Vanessa Dion Fletcher.

A sixth artist structure, A Caress Before Dawn by Rihab Essayh, functions as a "contemplative cool down space." But if you really want to blitz your senses, there are more literal cool-down options available as well; a bucket shower is on site, and you can always hang by the campfire before hitting the next hot zone.

Art Spin have been doing smaller trial versions of Public Sweat since last year. Notably, they rolled Foster's Mobile Sweat to various locations — from Ward's Island Beach to local festivals like the Geary Street Art Crawl — taking notes on how to make the sauna experience more accessible to folks of all comfort levels: from Othership "frequent flyers" to absolute beginners. 

The biggest pilot was at Harbourfront last December, a 10-day test-run presented as part of the Festival of Cool. That iteration featured two artist-built saunas, including Foster's, and it was open to the public, free of charge. I had the good fortune to visit one night, and discovered there is, indeed, a way to make a good sweat even better.

I'm a casual fan of a hot/cold circuit, whether experienced via bougie resort spa or the stripmall Russian banyas of Mississauga. It's not because of the wellness claims, though if that's your Goop-y kick, there are plenty of purported benefits, stuff to do with stress relief and improved circulation. I'm more into it for the simple, system-shocking pleasure of it all. Put it this way: it just feels good. And on that point, Hinton and Pimenta would seem to agree. Says Pimenta: "You don't really need to think about it beyond that. And I think we've seen some of that happen with people through our Mobile Sweat activations."

But Public Sweat wasn't conceived as sauna for sauna's sake. When you're subjecting yourself to extreme heat in the pursuit of self-care, your senses tend to be working a little differently: you're more attuned to your body and your mind. So what happens when you're a captive audience to a work of art? Personally, I loved the feeling of heightened focus.

It's a premise that excites the folks at Art Spin, who've always programmed art in surprising places — a storage facility (Holding Patterns) for example, or the neglected pavilions of Ontario Place (In/Future). Both of those past projects were full of fun and wonder, an antidote to white walls and pretention — or whatever it is that scares people away from discovering art.

And for Public Sweat, they're creating a mood of maximum R&R, where visitors can find art all around, even inside the saunas themselves. It's an environment that'll put folks in a different frame of mind, Pimenta explains — one that's majorly relaxed, I'm guessing. And that's an element of the project's grand experiment. Says Pimenta: "How will people's engagement with the artwork be different — be enhanced, hopefully?" 

"There's such a range of experiences between all of [the saunas]" Hinton adds. "They can augment your experience, they can define it and they can also provide a jumping point for conversation with strangers in the saunas too — which is one of the nicest parts."

About that last point: Public Sweat's been conceived of as a social event, the kind of thing that's meant to draw people of all ages and backgrounds. In researching the project, Art Spin looked into the way sweat-bathing figures in cultures around the world: Finland's saunas, the hammams of Turkey, Russian banyas, Korean kimjilbangs and Japanese musiburo or onsen. Beyond the obvious "feel good" nature of all those things, most sweat-bathing practices share another common link. And according to Art Spin, that's community.

The social side of sauna is something Art Spin's experienced firsthand. Here in Toronto, artist Chris Foster (who's also the technical director of Public Sweat), had been throwing winter get-togethers for some time. He called it "Sssauna Sundays," and gathered folks from the local arts community, including Hinton and Pimenta. "I've met so many new people through that project of his," says Hinton, who credits Foster for sparking the idea that became Public Sweat. (He suggested they try something sauna-related in 2019, following Art Spin's exhibition for Nuit Blanche Toronto.)

Developing Public Sweat has involved more than just curation, and according to Art Spin, the project has been a longer and more involved process than any of their previous endeavours. Progress was stalled in 2020 for the obvious reasons — this being a project that involves prolonged communal sweating in confined spaces. "Yeah, that's going to raise a few red flags," Pimenta laughs. 

"It's a project that's fundamentally about social connection, about really thinking about what community means," he says. "During the course of the pandemic, there were, I think, a handful of things that really started to make us feel like this project was taking on an even greater importance."

To bring those ideas to life, however, Art Spin had to learn the practical logistics of running a functioning sauna, and in July of 2022, they travelled to Finland and Norway, funded by the embassies of those two countries as part of Nordic Bridges, a year-long program of cultural events that was hosted across Canada that year. Finland has a rep for being the sauna capital of the world, home to more than 2.3 million saunas (essentially a sauna for every 2.5 people).

Hinton, Foster and Pimenta arrived on a mission to meet artists, but also the folks who build and maintain saunas of all kinds. They also came to sweat. 

"By the end of our trip, we had done 60 saunas in 30 days, which was a feat that we did not set out to accomplish," says Hinton, describing an itinerary that must have required a serious commitment to hydration. "It was an incredible diversity of spaces that we visited, ranging from a homemade/DIY dumpster sauna at a mobile sauna festival in Finland, to four-or-five-star luxury spa facilities and everything in between."

"It was absolutely fascinating to see just how ubiquitous sauna culture was in that country," says Pimenta, talking about their time in Finland. "It wasn't the same sort of emphasis on health and wellness that is perhaps a little more prevalent in North America."

[The saunas] can augment your experience, they can define it and they can also provide a jumping point for conversation with strangers in the saunas too — which is one of the nicest parts.- Layne Hinton, Art Spin

"I think because sauna culture is so commonplace there, there are so many different ways that people access it," says Hinton. "In Toronto, you might go to a bar after work with colleagues, or you might have brunch with family on Sunday morning. I think the sauna kind of fills that same need. It becomes this flexible social space."

Says Pimenta: "These spaces seemed to really accommodate and were very inviting to people regardless of body type, regardless of class …"

"Or age," Hinton adds.

"That was something that we found really interesting, and something that really inspired us," says Pimenta. "[We] wanted to infuse a similar spirit into Public Sweat."

"You know, I find our culture here can often be a bit more fragmented and segmented in terms of who goes to what kind of event or cultural activity. And I think that was one of the things that we really wanted to try and make happen in the case of Public Sweat, to really make this project as public as possible, as inclusive as possible," he says. To that end, several nights have been reserved for Public Sweat programming by and for diverse communities. 

"Sweat bathing in general is really sort of underrepresented in Canada. We don't really have a tradition of it," says Pimenta. "A big motivation for us with this project was to try and correct that to some extent."

That said, Public Sweat is a one-time only affair. For more information on the schedule of events and how to attend, visit www.publicsweat.com.