By Matthew-Robin Nye
Wood. Rain. Mud. Power. Tarp. Silicone. Nails. Nail-gun. Measuring tape. Anemic table saw. Dog with a runny nose. Headboard with splinters. Silicone on car seat, ruined raincoats. Screws. Drills. Norwegian stove. A hole-to-come. A little nibble on a windowsill. Stress. A drill on a windowsill. A level. A “right side” and a “wrong side.” Exacto knife. More rain. More mud. Insulation. Ladders. Leaky tarps. Laughter. Bawdy humour. Some wine to soak it all up.
An event coming to expression.
I am trying to determine what makes an event – the specious, expansive definition that the senselab laboured to define, and the 3E is attempting to reconstitute. We are making a sauna. The sauna is a concrete proposition for the activity of thought, and the thinking-with of activity. Perhaps these are the same thing.
Again: Tarp, silicone, nails. Materials that span the globe’s building systems. Here, minor deviations, spurred by locality, site-specificity, and the need for a choreographic relay between one event and another.
Again: Mud, power, tarp: This cut is at 92 inches, the next at 54; or five at 92, and then remeasure to be sure. Dictum: Cut once, measure twice. It never fits! Dicta can never account for the welter of experience, for every variation in the sauna-spree!
Once more, with feeling: What is 3e? What is it to me? What types of sociality are fostered, which are pruned, when we come together to build a sauna that we may not be the first to use? To work the work, to get the work working, to whuuurrrrk the work, WERQ!, I’ve almost fallen off a ladder.
There is a clearing in a field in Ste-Anne-du-Lac, a three hour drive north of Montreal, in Quebec. The field is small, perhaps 100 meters by 50; it is bordered by a small pond, a widening of a river at the base of a small mountain – a steep rocky hill – that is populated by maple trees, sugaring lines, a hunter’s blind. Last year, the field was cleared of brush and many saplings. The soil is tough, rocky. Soon it would have no longer been a field, were it not for human intervention. A muddy path tracks across the field, sucking at shoes and boots if they have the misfortune to plunge in. On one end of the path is a gravel parking area, surrounded by two small buildings. Halfway through the path, at the edge of the field, is a small garden, newer than the clearing, with plants – flowers and vegetables – browning and wilting as fall progresses.
The end of the path is about two-thirds of the way into the field: a site of trodden vegetation, hammering, the ‘whomp’ of nails guns and the wine of drills. The dry hacking and wheezing of hand saws, the banshee cry of skillsaw. The top layer of soil has been scraped from the field, barely a dent, large rocks and rubble frustrating shovel. This field might have succumbed to the brush and saplings of encroaching forest, but it wasn’t going anywhere.
What makes a sauna an event? Sore backs and cleared space. A stranger hopping out of a car, journeyed from a distant city, here to work. Sauna architects an environment and peoples its never-right corners as it stacks and stacks and stacks. What is expressed in the sauna-ing of an event? A nascent sociality based on the here-and-now, a what are you doing rather than a who are you doing. I want to say that this is a way of side-eyeing the impersonal, but I still can’t imagine that a space of release and fluid and body and yes, desire, could be impersonal. It is the most deeply personal coming-to-expression of the pre personal here-and-now.
