This is a blog documenting and describing some of our experiences researching into the Swedish bathing culture. We will try to share our take on the culture and introduce a few places that we visited and the characters that we met.
Sȯ-nə is a collaborative project between UK based artists Beth Kettel and Sean Millington. The duo share a common interest in considering and incorporating all aspects of exhibition making as artwork through working across disciplines, and through collaboration.
Sȯ-nə is a project that develops new works and collaborations through research into sauna and bathing cultures across the world. The project encompasses art, design and socio-political issues that are often overlooked in the current political rhetoric. Contrary to the contemporary spa – almost invariably a place of privilege and luxury – the sauna has more inclusive roots: a place for social, political, and cultural exchange. Sȯ-nə is in response to the changing social conditions and shifting boundaries between public and private life; between personal and communal space. The sauna offers a pause in the overwhelming pace of modern western society reconnecting body to mind and in turn, to community. We aim to develop a better understanding of the fundamental principles of sauna culture from around the world.
Through opening up our ideas and our research exploring different cultures, typologies and traditions of saunas, along with their social, political and cultural impact, we’re interested in finding out how this communal site operates in different cultures. And what bringing those different ideas together can offer: as a public facility, as a collaborative opportunity, as contemporary art and as a hybrid of these things.
We’re interested in the locality of saunas, and what varying landscape features add to the sauna experience, such as a cold lake to dip between sauna sessions; a city train passing overhead or sunlight that could yield operative solar energy. We’re interested too in different locations for where Sȯ-nə can exist and what the location’s character might bestow.
For the travel bursary we focused on the bathing culture of Sweden. We expected it to show us a hybrid of influences in which this project is built around, for example cultural references from neighbouring Finland (where the sauna originates), to more English Victorian values of leisure. We began by travelling Stockholm’s archipelago, staying at a Swedish summer home, hoping to gain an insight into the domestic and private usage of saunas and sauna culture in a rural environment. Building studies around the relationship between the surrounding nature and the sauna, in terms of: the human experience with it and the landscapes that alter the experience. We then spent the remainder of the time split between Stockholm, Malmo and Gothenburg with a short trip to Copenhagen. We aimed to research how bathing culture manifests itself in an the urban metropolis and compare the dichotomy between the rural and urban cultural traits of saunaing
The varying types of saunas across sweden certainly did provide an overview we had hoped for from simple wooden hut saunas in the country, to mutated fusions of Hammams, Saunas and Roman baths under one roof in the city. We also had a few surprises thrown in like Sara’s clay sauna in the quarry and wonderful examples of bathing houses striking a harmonious blend of the rural simplicity of sauning within the hectic bustle of the city like at Ribersborgs Kallbadhusl in Malmo and Bastun i frihamnen in Gothenburg.
From our trip, seeing a good portion of Sweden, we already realised we need to go back to explore the rural northern section of the country. We found this out best by saunaing and talking with local enthusiasts and regulars at the saunas we visited, which we found to be an invaluable part of our research. Not only invaluable through offering further saunas to visit but also in historical details, stories and practical details about materials, how to build saunas and how to form a community through saunaing and working with councils and the public. The varying styles change city by city and region by region, which is such an exciting prospect as our research can continually grow with our understanding of different countries and styles of bathing culture.
Our time spent on Stockholm’s archipelago wasn’t as rich an experience as we had hoped in regards to being able to experience private saunas. We actually had a more successful time visiting private saunas whilst in the cities. We learnt that private saunas became common place in communal housing after staying in these types of accommodation over our stay. There wasn’t a great abundance of saunas that accompanied the summer homes as we had first expected after experiencing them on a previous research trip to Finland (despite being a neighbouring country with a very similar climate). Through the people that we met whilst visiting different Swedish saunas, we learnt that private saunas for rural houses is more common place in the northern countryside of Sweden where the sauna culture is a lot more in line with Finland. This culture embodies the simplicity of the sauna, in terms of function and design. The usage of the sauna is not seen as a luxury treat but a place to cleanse. This simplicity is echoed with the sauna often being a humble wooden hut style structure that will often be built out of material that is to hand and a simple wood burning stove again using wood such as birch that is readily available.
This connection to nature as an intrinsic part of the sauna culture experienced when we visited Hallesgarden just a 15 minute bus ride out of Stockholm city centre. Set within a nature park you are able to cool down after sauna sessions in the natural lake that is situated outside, feeling the wind against your skin and surrounded by leafy trees all becomes part of the sauna process. This place was recommended to us by our AirBnB host Daniel who we also met in the sauna, where we continued to discuss his experience and thoughts on Swedish bathing culture in comparison to other parts of the world. The sauna is a very social space not too dissimilar from an English pub, where regulars attend weekly and talk about a wide variety of topics. The comparison is useful for us to build our own knowledge and understanding of the culture. Another example of how entwined nature is to the sauna came from our visit to a private members sauna in Tantolunden park, Stockholm. The Tanto Bastun is a floating sauna that is a very simple cuboid structure that has a small changing room and a sauna within the cube. We have become accustomed to having a shower as standard in leisure centres and spas but here things have been stripped back. The only shower was from the water of the lake that the sauna itself is floating on. There we met up with Birger, a member who kindly let us use the sauna as guests but only if we met him at his favourite time to sauna… 6am! The sauna, situated within a park in the centre of a big city was very quiet this time of the morning, only to be disturbed by the movement of a Beaver swimming in the shared water that we viewed from the window of the sauna and then the booming voice of Birger who broke into traditional Swedish folk songs that he explained described seasonal changes. Having an abundance of beautiful waterways is utilised in Swedish bathing and with the two examples above show you how the sauna’s location alone is directed by natural forms such as water and where wind and silence also become part of this experience.
Not only have natural occurrences of water made a home for the humble sauna, but at Sunds Grustag – a stone quarry that houses water on Varmdo (a 45 minute bus journey from the centre of Stockholm) has become the spot for Sara Soderberg’s ‘The Public Sauna’. We arranged to meet with Sara to show us around her hand made clay sauna. Unfortunately that day the sauna wasn’t functioning due to damage that Sara was currently repairing, which was interesting to find out how the public interacted with the free self-service sauna. The Sauna is constructed from clay from the quarry, and concerns the Swedish notion of allemansratten that, as Sara puts it, “describes a public access right which permits most of the land in the country to be freely roamed and utilized”.
The bathing culture within the cities tended to over-complicate the simple nature discussed above, which correlates with the general ways of city vs country living in Sweden. There is a return to the luxurious over simple functionality like in the UK, for example: at the Central Badet in Stockholm you are able to dine in your white dressing gown with champagne. The facilities take from varying world forms of bathing with the main feature akin of a traditional Roman baths, with multiple heated rooms around warm water pools. You also have a wooden sauna and a tiled steam room, taken from the traditional Finnish saunas and Turkish Hammam. Even though this is common from our experience with spas and leisure centres in the UK it still feels like a catering for all, like a restaurant that serves world buffet. It is a distance away from the origins of the simple hut. In the beautiful building of the Central Badet you become very aware of the division between yourself and the connection to nature, the brick walls and compulsory swimwear builds a barrier between your skin and the wind.
The Valhalla Badet in Gothenburg is a familiar leisure centre set-up. The sauna in a more secondary function to be used after exercise at the gym or swimming. This is closer to how the UK uses the sauna: to relax the muscles (which it certainly does) but misses the key function – to cleanse. There is an etiquette to taking a sauna and many of the reasons are centred around cleanliness, for example: wearing flip flops on your feet or having a towel to sit on while in the sauna to collect one’s sweat or showering before entering the sauna.
There are examples of a return to utilising nature and a simple harmony of function and practicality found at Ribersborgs Kallbadhusl in Malmo and Bastun i frihamnen in Gothenburg. At Ribersborgs in particular, where, firstly, you are presented with a walk down a promenade that glides across the shallow sea water to a beautiful 1914 constructed elegant wooden structure. The structure is almost the shape of a number 8 on its side where two calm pools of seawater are trapped for bathers to cool off. There is a large boulder wall that protects the structure and the pools from the crashing sea waves but you are also able to access these waves if you fancy a slightly rougher dip. From inside the mixed sauna a large window faces the waves crashing into the boulder wall where you can sit and watch European Swallows swoop in and out of view. Bastun i frihamnen in Gothenburg is situated in an industrial part of town on the dock side. Its interesting architectural aesthetic embraces its neighbourhood with the skin of this stilted structure, a corrugated metal facade akin to that of the shipping containers across the water. This sauna utilises again the abundance of water that the city is built around where it is channeled into an open air swimming pool that floats alongside the natural waterways. Although this sauna has a clear reference to the city with its appearance it also has kept the simplicity that is so charming to the more rural country saunas and has embraced its own area, for example the changing rooms are built from 12,000 recycled glass bottles which could be compared to the country sauna being built from the birch wood from the surrounding forrest.
The varying types of saunas across sweden certainly did provide an overview we had hoped for from simple wooden hut saunas in the country, to mutated fusions of Hammams, Saunas and Roman baths under one roof in the city. We also had a few surprises thrown in like Sara’s clay sauna in the quarry and wonderful examples of bathing houses striking a harmonious blend of the rural simplicity of sauning within the hectic bustle of the city like at Ribersborgs Kallbadhusl in Malmo and Bastun i frihamnen in Gothenburg.
From our trip, seeing a good portion of Sweden, we already realised we need to go back to explore the rural northern section of the country. We found this out best by saunaing and talking with local enthusiasts and regulars at the saunas we visited, which we found to be an invaluable part of our research. Not only invaluable through offering further saunas to visit but also in historical details, stories and practical details about materials, how to build saunas and how to form a community through saunaing and working with councils and the public. The varying styles change city by city and region by region, which is such an exciting prospect as our research can continually grow with our understanding of different countries and styles of bathing culture.
