Workshop: Prehistoric Bathing & The Parliament of Species, apply by September 7.

When: September 26–28, 2025
Where: Eden Baths, Averøy, Norway
Deadline to apply: September 7, 2025
Submit to: edenbaths@gmail.com

The gathering will take place on the wild, water-rich landscape of Averøy, at Eden Baths with project leader and artist Nazarè Soares, and marks the soft launch of Bathing & Beyond: Bathing, Art and New Ecologies in the age of Water, in 2025.

Workshop is led by:

• Elin T. Sørensen, artist, marine landscape architect, diversity activist and independent researcher, whose practice spans eco-social community art, urban rewilding, multispecies design and placemaking (NO/GR)
• Rimas Kavaliauskas, sauna master and engineer, cultural researcher, and founder of the Lithuania Bath Academy (LT), dedicated to reviving Baltic steam bathing practices rooted in deep ecology and communal care.

The sauna in Northern Europe historically served as the primary shelter in a wild landscape—a vital space where warmth, healing, and community converged. It was often the first structure built in a new settlement, and the last to be abandoned. For early post-Ice Age communities, it marked the threshold where Culture meets Nature—a deeply embodied refuge of survival, ritual, and transformation. The workshop draws on this historical and cultural resonance. Together, we will build a temporary prehistoric sauna using local stones, wood, and turf. The process becomes an act of listening and negotiation with the landscape and its more-than-human inhabitants—an opportunity to inhabit liminality, share knowledge, and open new modes of placemaking.

Plants Cam . Lithuania Bath Academy . Sauna Village. Photo: Nazarè SoaresSauna sketch: Rimas Kavaliauskas

The entire process—from building the structure to enacting the final bathing ritual—will unfold as a slow and collective negotiation with the landscape. Constructing a prehistoric sauna is a form of deep listening: a dialogue with water, stone, earth, plants, fire, and weather. The body itself is treated as a primary instrument for sensing the land— a sensing architecture and an embodied tool for environmental attunement. The final ritual will emerge as a culmination—a shared act that embodies everything the group has negotiated over the previous days. This slow build-up supports a meaningful convergence of the practice of incubation and multispecies diplomacy.

As Elin T. Sørensen frames it, the workshop adopts the role of ecological diplomat, as conceptualized by Baptiste Morizot—an engaged, relational approach to multispecies coexistence. Rather than speaking for the more-than-human world, participants will enter into active place-based negotiations, where non-human companions (plants, stones, waters, and winds) are treated as agents with their own presences and priorities.

“Can you imagine placemaking that speaks up for all living species and embraces diversity in the broadest sense? Planning processes that account for the living conditions of all beings who use, live, and have lived in a place for generations.” — Elin T. Sørensen & Cecilie Sachs Olsen

As for Rimas Kavaliauskas, this immersive, time-spanning structure invites participants not just on a “journey through time”, but into a liminal space—an open threshold—where boundaries between species, disciplines, and times blur, and new relational modes can take root. In this context, the sauna we will build is both physically rooted in ancestral knowledge and symbolically connected to ecological futures. Drawing on the notion of deep time, it acknowledges the long arc of human and more-than-human histories embedded in the land, materials, and rituals. It is a structure that holds the wisdom of the past, responds to the urgencies of the present, and invites responsibility toward the future—bridging temporal layers through embodied, multispecies engagement. In this sense, the sauna is more than a shelter—it is a vessel of relational knowledge and sensory diplomacy. It invites us to remember that building with the Earth is not simply a craft, but a cultural, historical, and ecological act of care.