Sauna as Epistemic Device: heated discussions and circulation of minoritised knowledges, languages, steam and sweat

I propose to approach the sauna not as wellness, but as an epistemic device — a space where knowledge is enacted rather than communicated. Alongside my work in artistic research as a researcher, educator, practitioner, and administrator, I practice as a certified sauna master trained at the Lithuanian Bath Academy. I propose small-group sauna rituals as situations of knowledge production. Within intensified sensory conditions — heat, breath, rhythm, bodily proximity — language gradually loses its regulatory authority. Meaning emerges through embodied negotiation, attention, and affective attunement.
Rather than speaking about knowledge, participants inhabit its formation. The sauna becomes a temporary epistemic infrastructure exposing the limits of discursive regimes dominant in academia. It asks whether artistic research can exist as an event rather than representation, and whether knowledge may circulate without stabilising into language (5G metaphor).
The proposal also engages traditional knowledge embedded in bathing cultures across Northeastern Europe, where collective sauna practices remain alive from Lithuania to Finland and from Eastern Poland to Ukraine. In much of the Western world, such traditions have largely vanished, historically displaced by religious and scientific rationalities.
Situated conceptually between Lithuania and Ireland — two small-language cultures marked by histories of linguistic marginalisation and asymmetrical power relations — the proposal reflects on the fragility and politics of language itself. Against this backdrop, the sauna ritual operates as a micro-political experiment: a setting in which minoritised, embodied, and often delegitimised forms of knowledge can surface without being immediately captured by explanatory frameworks.
The sauna thus operates as a laboratory for epistemic disorientation, where knowledge appears as process: circulating, dissolving, reconfiguring — contingent, sensory, and shared.