Grab your swimsuit: Toronto’s getting a wood-fired Nordic sauna with live shows

A new music and arts venue is popping up in the city this December, but it’s the last place you’d imagine to see a live show. Mobile Sweat is a nomadic wood-fired sauna that will be coming to Toronto during Harbourfront Centre’s annual Festival of Cool.

Put on by Art Spin, the outdoor sauna is free and available on a first-come, first-served basis. Be sure to pack a towel and swimsuit, and prepare to experience art while you get your sweat on.

Art Spin “presents exceptional contemporary art in unexpected spaces,” according to its website.

The team created Mobile Sweat after travelling to Finland and Norway to learn about Nordic sauna cultures.

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Mobile Sweat will showcase a program of contemporary sound and video art, as well as live performances. It’ll be located as a standalone building in the northeast corner of the Harbourfront Centre campus, where Lavazza Cafe used to be.

“At its heart, Mobile Sweat will serve as a celebration of community building, public health, and social interaction, values that are at the very core of sweat bathing traditions around the world,” says a statement from Harbourfront Centre.

Mobile Sweat will travel across the GTA and southern Ontario as a part of Art Spin’s larger project, Public Sweat, which is happening in the spring of 2023.

Also on site is Sauna Obscura, an installation created by the Finnish artist Heidi Lunabba.

“Experience the combination of camera obscura and wood-fired sauna, where you sweat inside a camera with the surrounding environment projected onto the walls and the bodies of the sauna goers,” says the description.

Also happening during Festival of Cool this December are performances by Nordic bands Tuuletar and VÍÍK (from Game of Thrones), the North American premiere of Jingyi Wang’s ground-breaking and interactive Post Capitalistic Auction, the Ontario premiere of Moby Dick, and much more.

With winter around the corner, Mobile Sweat sounds like the cold weather remedy we’ve been waiting for!

Mobile Sweat at Festival of Cool

Where: Harbourfront Centre North East Pavillion, 219 Queens Quay West
When: December 8th to 18th, 2022, 4 PM to 10 PM