The Patient Sauna

They were entered through a thick wood door leading to a dim corridor, connecting two separate dressing rooms and a spacious washing area covered with light gray tile floors and walls. The Sauna chamber was accessed from the washing area and sealed with a glass panel door supported by a bulky spruce frame. Transparency enabled parents to watch over children and condemn them if they soaped the floor tiles to slide flat across the room. They considered themselves a modest and modern Sauna. They didn’t exhibit any traces of hammer hits missing nail heads as the interior panels were attached using iron nails shot from a compressor driven nailgun.  The panels expressed a warm yellow colour and covered the insulations and ceiling neatly, modestly hiding the surrounding concrete walls.

The rooms of the Sauna had very small windows at ceiling level which faced the inner yard. The window frames were angled towards to the floor, echoing times when coal had been poured into basements and electric lights were scarce. The two current electric lights of the Sauna chamber were covered with wooden shades. Ten thin straight pine sheets angled light downwards, so that the people sitting on the birch benches stretching the back wall would not feel exposed. The stove was generous with a deep pit of fist size stones, safely distanced from the corner panels and surrounded by sturdy birch handrail. The glass of the outer window of the Sauna was textured to resemble water droplets allowing only light trough.

Like its sibling, they were in a basement but not ashamed. They were in different buildings, numbered 35 and 37 of the same housing company, located in A district which was a moderately fancy neighbourhood. The siblings were only made distinct by their usage. 37 also housed weekly jogging-saunas but these were seldom attended, even though like the annual Christmas Sauna, they were free and open for all occupants. Most people either reserved a weekly Thursday shift or signed up for vacant Saturday shifts by writing their last name and apartment number on a schedule by the door. Shifts were an hour. On Saturdays both Saunas heated for seven hours straight, welcoming seven families, individuals or groups. Because of the latest energy crisis the price of a reservation rose from 2€ to 3€.

The two buildings had been constructed for the employees of a nearby hospital. This explained the small apartment size. They were for single nurses and worked to keep them this way. Some of the first occupants still lived in the house. The small apartments were balanced by big shared spaces such as the Saunas, a hobby room which could fit fifty occupants, fully featured laundry and drying rooms. These were the expressions of the collective desire of the housing company owners.

Because of a particularity of the building’s memory system, it took time for new occupants to learn the buildings behaved. News concerning the free and open jogging-sauna events and other details regarding shared spaces were conveyed in bulletin board literature, a niche style of fiction which required excessive efforts from younger readers. Elders understood that this literary form was appreciated by observing how pins holding the changing prints gradually frayed the soft fibres of the bulletin board. This process offered great comfort for the initiated. Not reading also spared the younger occupants from complicated questions. It was a blessing that they did not know that nobody, not even landlords owned the apartments. Owners only had shares in a collectively owned housing company, which could take any form.

“A text of the agreement would make their experience less tangible”. The Sauna reasoned though a process which took countless bathing cycles to compute and to store in a spruce panel colour change. If the people had learned that their comfort was based on an agreement which took the shape of two separate buildings, they would have been stressed by the responsibility of maintaining them.

On the days the Sauna in building 35 was not heated they were only interrupted by scheduled cleaning or distant noises of people passing by in the basement corridor. Five days a week the Sauna rested and contemplated its existence peacefully. This kind of slumber was common for housing company Saunas in the city, who all had a lot of time to think. Despite this vast computational power, their processing was very slow because it was affected by a specific type of amnesia. The housing company Saunas only retained residual memories. This meant they could only keep track of their thoughts in material changes such as chalk formations near water outlets, appearance of rust on their nails or screws and by following seasonal changes.

This Saunas chalk formations were cleaned diligently and the nail heads were too deep in the panels to see. So, it kept track of its thought and retained coherent memories by observing slow changes in the colour of its spruce panels. This slow thought was paced by occasional wood rattle and pops, caused by the panels undergoing seasonal changes. The Sauna knew it was owned collectively and was very forgiving to itself. It had very few responsibilities and keeping ludic thought was a self-indulgent side project. It enjoyed making observations and storing them patiently in the panel colour changes.

Despite its best efforts it could not distinguish between its guests. All the people had soft cheeks and were too similar to keep track of. All the guests returned the two blue plastic and the one steel bucket on the same bench of the washing area. Because the Sauna was pacing its thoughts slowly, it was as if the three buckets never moved. Between each visitor, even the löylykauha and white plastic kippa were positioned the same way, to relieve water and traces of use. The only thing notable about the different users was how few traces they left. Even on Saturdays, when occupants and families used the Sauna in turns for hours, each returned the buckets and tools on the bench between the shifts. A kumilasta was used to clean the floor tiles of soap and excess water.

None of the residents, the Sauna nor the janitor could explain why the buckets were kept in their particular order. The contract had been silent and maintained too meticulously for any thought to occur. The steel bucket, intended for löylyvesi on the right by the window, the plastics to the left and löylykauha and kippa on the front. For the uninitiated these tools appeared as they had been dropped in their place. Placed this way the containers would take the least amount of space on the bench, allowing people to sit before bathing and being close to the radiator they would dry swiftly. There was no guarantee that this the plan but it was maintained. The Sauna was reset every time it was used. It was a beautiful non-ornamental composition which the Sauna enjoyed.

The Sauna was not bothered that it couldn’t remember how many years it had been in service. When it needed assurance of the passing time to form some coherent thought, it observed the changes in the yellow hue of the wooden panels. Judging from the current hue, it assessed it was at least 30 years old. In conversations with its closest neighbour the Air-raid shelter, it knew it had been first built on this site in the fifties and had always been intended for the building. It was part of the design, a self-evident feature, outlined in building plans without any mental strain.

Over the years The Air-raid shelter had been largely converted into a bicycle storage, but it maintained core features, the iron doors, ventilation shafts and the small room for protective gear, insulations and air pumps. It was an exhausting neighbour, constantly making noise of itself, claiming to be on a holy mission, responsible for raising the final generation of men. In moments when the Air-raid shelters’ rants and dark grunts bothered the Sauna, it took slow comfort in witnessing rays jumping across the panel seams. In the winter it followed frost forming on the outer windows. It smiled patiently.

Unlike the Air-raid shelter, eagerly waiting for deployment, this Sauna… Like its peers, the armada of modest Saunas scarred in housing company basements in Helsinki, they were marked by regular use. This regular use was only made remarkable by how little evidence of the use was left. As if the people did not exist at all and were characterized by what they could not be remembered for.

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Suffocating the academic and student solidarity movement for Palestinian liberation in Finnish higher education (2023) Anaïs Duong-Pedica is a warning of an arriving regime. It maps out how the Palestinian Solidarity Movement in Finland is being shunned and how people asking for a ceasefire for Gaza are silenced by public institutions they serve. We are now witnessing proper censorship acts for example at Aalto University, where a students course work was removed before it was evaluated by the teacher. I imagine similar cases happening in the press too. There is too much happening to plot out what is taking place in the domain of art but it appears that presenting opinions publicly, which work against a mainstream narrative and against a definition dividing people as terrorists or human rights advocates, based on their usefulness for western powers, are made more difficult then before.

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Finland has decided to buy weapons from Israel. This was agreed to by army generals, in processes which could not be effected democratically. In an effort to understand them I imagine generals perceive societies being led by competing interests, where contracts, such as the borders of states are formed as compromise to ensure that the interests of different groups are respected. The negotiation of competing interests as a foundation of politics, is an easy model to understand.

For me the pandemic taught that contracts made with this logic will not sustain us through real crises. For example Finland had to compete with Germany and other EU nations in acquiring life-saving equipment such as N95 masks… And we lost many times over.

For me it is clear that forming contracts with an apartheid state, which is accused by a growing number of people to be in the process of committing an ethnic cleansing and even a genocide, is a bad idea and will have hick-ups along the way.

Why are Finnish generals ignorant of human rights?

I trust the military’s capacities in assessing the effectiveness of different weapon systems, but assessing effectiveness, which is how generals ground this decision publicly, is not a sustainable model. This arms trade represents some lives more valuable than others. I find it clear that if Finnish children are protected by weapons, which have been used to kill children in Gaza, our children are not protected, they are made complicit in what the State of Israel is doing in Gaza today.

Sustainable politics are rooted in values. Looking at the turmoil which Finland, Europe and the World is in now, I see that shared values and goals which seem unrealistic to achieve within a lifetime, such as undivided human rights, provide and set trajectories towards which we can organize sustainably. The situation is too dire for us to loose hope. The right to live cannot be bargained with because it is lost in the trade. This is what it means to be “complicit”.

I’ve noticed that the same people who voiced concerns about the declining human rights situation in Russia, before the attack on Ukraine, have also voiced their concerns about buying weapon systems from an apartheid state… Why is their critique systematically shunned? Finnish state led companies continued with business as usual while people were jailed for fighting for human rights… Even after Crimea was annexed. For me this illustrates that vital knowledge on what it means to lead has been lost from Finnish institutions.

The past five years have been a battle for what it means to be a human. The pandemic established a collective understanding of frightening bio-class relations. For example people who had stable jobs in Finland, could form social bubbles and sit the pandemic out. Thanks to economic preconditions, which many did not notice underlying our society, some became richer in the process. This is well illustrated by how government substitutes benefited business owners but not workers.

Finnish politicians and ruling classes unanimously accepted that “hygiene” and “health” meant that people in the service industry should work in unsafe conditions. Low income workers who continued working, risked their lives. For example the nurses strike was not met with public support nor sympathy. This grand reveal of the foundations of Finnish wellbeing is within living memory.

But there is an asymmetry in knowledge which the pandemic produced. People who chose personal “hygiene” and “health” do not understand the mechanisms which constituted their wellbeing. With out an understanding of how privileges were maintained, Hygge is death! If a war breaks out in Finland, the same classes of people who were made richer by the pandemic will profit and the people who are forced to servitude, such as Wolt Couriers, forced entrepreneurs and low ranking wage labourers will be put at risk.

A leading researcher of the The Finnish Institute of International Affairs Charly Salonius-Pasternak was provided a platform on YLE to give people instructions to prepare for a war in the next two years. They are telling people to be physically fit for war by 2025. Their prompt is a performance of the absence of political imagination of our corrupt elites. They have lost hope and do not understand what they are asking for.

We are not witnessing Finland and other warmongering European nations revealing “double standards” or stumbling with rhetorical inconsistencies in their support of Israeli apartheid politics and the bombing of Gaza. Our leaders are involved in this genocide with intent. The critique which postcolonial thought has underlined is revealed as truth: The concept of human rights is used primarily as a tool for imposing whiteness, Eurocentric models and geopolitical power relations that are favourable to the West.

The post-war momentum has been appropriated by parties which are organized for growth and are willing to bargain for human rights for profits. This has to be changed. If we start bargaining with human rights, we will lose. People who can imagine, negotiate and discuss, listen and understand are more needed than ever.

Enjoying to read Israelin kansanmurhataktiikat – havaintoja epäinhimillistämisestä, eläimellistämisestä ja vegaanipesusta [Israels geneciotial tactics…] (2023) by Freja Högback, Sanna Karhu, Lumi Kauppinen and Helinä Ääri.

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Returning from an intensive tour with waters. Between 22.-24. September we complied a project with Tea Andreoletti commissioned by the Instytut Kultury Miejskiej organisation for the opening of their new facilities at Kunszt Wodny in Gdańsk. For the opening event, we prepared and bottled 300 flasks of “Wypij Morze!” (Drink Sea!) carbonated mineral water which was served for guests from a “Bar (Słono)Wodny” meaning (Sea)Water bar. In all we produced 250 litres of the bespoken drink and supplied the audience with tap waters from around the city. There were a lot of performances, architectural light shows and sound/music at the opening event… Most of which referred to the sea and waters in different ways. The building is at the site of a historic watermill.

We prepared the project during the summer and we visited the city in August for research. The recipe of Wypij Morze! was drafted on the first trip in a meeting with Institute of Oceanology PAN scientists (Tymon Zielinski, Tomasz Kijewski & Aleksandra Koroza) and the Gdańska Infrastruktura Wodociągowo-Kanalizacyjna (GIWK) staff, who are responsible for the city drinking water affairs. The project was curated by Anna Mitus and produced by Anna Kwiatkowska (IKM) who handled both the production and the intensive field excursions, which took us all around the city between the strange shoreside of Rewa (where we collected seawater for consumption) and suburbs of Urunia. Natalia Cyrzan (IKM) worked on the back end of the project establishing and facilitating exchange with GIWK, the Institute of Oceanology and a tip:tap, a Berlin based NGO also working on a (tap)waterbar initiative. In addition to the performance we also took part in a breakfast seminar discussing sea & drinking water affairs and hosted a workshop for children where they could design bottle labels.

Ingredients for Wypij Morze!

1l/g Instytut Kultury Miejskiej Tap Water
NaCl (Table salt) 2,4
MgSO₄ (Epsom salt) 2
NaHCO₃ (Baking soda) 1,1
CaSO4 (Gypsum) 0,4
Mg(OH)2 (Magnesium hydroxide) 0,4
Ca (Calcium) 0,2
KC₄H₅O₆ (Cream of Tartar) 0,1

Our project explored the diversity of tap waters, water as commons, infrastructures’ relationship with domestic spaces and how changes brought about by rising sea levels will affect the latter. Gdańsk has a complex history with water (featuring sewage innovations), wells, mills and canals which were introduced to by GIWK.

For me and Tea this project was a continuation of the previous Waterbar/Spring -excursions but the scale of what we prepared for Gdańsk was grandiose and depended on a close exchange with local artists. This facet of the project was elegantly planned and organised by Mitus. The Bar (Słono)Wodny, which served as a main stage of our performance was built to the main hall of the Kunszt Wodny building. It was a geology inspired bastion-bar-counter built for the project by artists Krzysztof Surmacz and Daniel Sobański. Wypij Morze! was served to people in three different fancy glass bottles which prints were designed by artists Alina Mielnik, Kamil Kak and Karol Polak. Each produced their own design but they all contained the same drink.

Mielnik’s illustration offers hope for a submerged city, Kak’s bottle design performs the sinking of Gdanśk on every gulp and Polak produced a semiotic atomisation which broke the heavy content of the drink into a digestible mess.

At the Bar (Słono)Wodny, Tea shared their skills in tasting and we presented the raw minerals of Wypij Morze! explaining it to be “the taste of the future”. In exchanges with guests we explained that the drink had “magnesium for stamina so that we can hold your breath under water” and that it had extra calcium to “make your bones into beautiful fossils”. These macabre sales speeches worked as a segue to imagine the current state of the Baltic, contamination and future of coastline cities. The Institute of Oceanology predicts that Gdańsk may be swallowed by the sea as continental ice sheets melt. Inviting people to drink sea, as a responce to climate change gave me gothic-horror-thrills and the narrative was backed by an installation with various mineral and high pressure gas equipment placed on the bar counters. During our August trip we carried the carbonisation tools with us when exploring the city, appearing as scuba divers.

At the bar we also handed out tap-water drinks, the most popular of which was “Domowa od Ani z lodem” (Anna Kwiatkowska’s home tap) and “Jaskinia Batmana (Orunia)”, which was inspired by our visit to the Stara Orunia Reservoir, which currently serves as a bat dormitory. Our August visit to the reservoir was facilitated by GIWK who provided us with a detailed history of the city’s drinking water infrastructure. “Domowa od Ani z lodem” drink was the centrepiece of our bar-installation, illuminated by a led lamp and luring people like a lighthouse. A simple and effective flopping of public and private spheres, the added tension of all the waters being prepared by the same public infrastructure company.

The bar also included a soundscape which consisted of processed sounds of carbonisation (benjolin&twinpeaks&delaynomore!) and wave-drinking sounds. Tomek the light/sound designer is also to thank for the look of the bar. Anna M. also published a text on the project later on which is available in Polish.

Returned from Gdańsk on a bus (26h) and prepared an installation for Drifts -festival which was led by artist directors Giovanna Esposito Yussif & Soko Hwang. On the opening day on Saturday I presented the “Our Grand Water Treatment Plant” installation composed of ceramics, minerals and pumps. A centre piece was a makeshift water filter system which circulated tap water through natural stones collected from the Kurängen spring, altering its composition. I also prepared pebbles for people to taste. The modular installation was exhibited on old water pumps found at the “Filterhall” room of the Museum of Technology in Vanhakaupunki. The filterhall is the site where the drinking water of Helsinki was supplied from before the Päijännetunneli was opened. I guess the theme of the festival called for our own water infrastructure initiative.

Our Grand Water Treatment Plant was built from the same building blocks as the installation at the The Surface Holds Depths -exhibition at Lappeenranta Art Museum (curated by Miina Hujala) and wooden frames first used as props for the “The Forest Spring Affair” performance in Sipoonkorpi late 2022 . One frame showed ceramics made from wild clay collected with the Nomadic Kiln Group (Monika Czyżyk & Elina Vainio) and I also included a ceramic whisk which housed a bacterial cellulose membrane (which removes oil traces from the water) that was prepared under the supervision of artist Alexey Buldakov.

On Sunday I gave a lecture performance discussing drinking waters using the same notes as during the Kiilan äänipäivä performance in 2022 (I think I’ve now performed everything I can imagine with this piece) and I also supplied the audience with 22 liters of Wypij Morze! during the festival.

Drifts succeeded in inviting a lot of great artists and managing large crowds. My absolute favourite was bela from Berlin who hardcore screamed through a theatrical act. The sound system of the space (or perhaps the curatorial plan) favoured descant tones and most concerts utilized some kind of whipping clash-crashes. This served bela well and Kaino Wennerstrand’s phaser effected acoustic guitar riffs too! Most of the sets were didactic and deployed aestheticized glitches for the spoken word bits. Most performers used automated computer processes. There was no rage in analog form. The bass was good too but most complex and interesting events took place in high registers.

An Tul was a touching new act for me. They performed outdoors with intensive charisma establishing a stage by their mere stances. They showed humour with out joke and offered intuitive nature interactions (a flock took their set as a cue for starting their winter migration). I had very high expectations for Nkisi on Sunday because I just learned about their work from a Techno at the End of the Future, Episode 1: London podcast. The set had a positive-gabber vibe but I didn’t get on a rhythm high.

There was a screening too. The Otolith Group’s “Hydra Decapita” (2010) was great to see and served as a perfect finale for my water-tour-vibes because they utilized short wave radio tones in their artistic documentary detailing Drexciya (Our Bar (Słono)Wodny soundscape also had a SW segment!).

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Minä, Marxilainen taiteilija [Me, a Marxist Artists] (2021) by Jyrki Siukonen is an elegant book, its written like a journal and assumes the reader to be well informed. The book reveals an absence of Marxist or Communist theories on aesthetics and depicts intricate political debates where Finnish artists and cultural workers of the 70ties attempted piece together a plan for a leftists artistic program. Marx was bad at art and their theories on production/commodities do not apply to cultural production. Similarly a Marxist depiction of historical progress fails in understanding the intricacies of style (that it does not “progress” but fluctuates). Siukonen reveals that artistic research in Finland is rooted on efforts to make sense of art production, by evaluating an artists responsibilities for society and the particularities of their praxis. Siukonen offers a striking analysis on the utopian function of socialist realism: In actuality communism in the Soviet Union existed only in art. I enjoy the banality which they depict the terrors of great purge… Nearly every artists or cultural theorist from the Soviet Union they cite, is revealed in the footnotes to be have imprisoned or executed by Stalin. By depicting an array of failed creative efforts to align artistry with Marx/communism, the book grinds an opening for imagining contemporary approaches to the question. Being a Marxist Artist is depicted as a learning process, which outcome we should not predict (just like communism!).

I got asked for a comment in a Hyperallergic article on Criticism in Finland Over Country’s Selection Process for the Venice Biennale (2023) Avedis Hadjian. The bit where I shyly hope for institutional change “Perhaps it [the curatorial process] also succeeds in having a lasting impact on the institutions involved in the process.” was cut in the editorial process.

Keho vaatii tunnetta [Body calls for emotion] (2023) Tiia From & Onni Oja. A nice to read, solid review of Crimes of the Future (2022) David Cronenberg. This text was written as an assignment for a course in Kankaanpää Art School and the authors very kindly credit me as a teacher! I also wrote shortly about the film.