Commission for "A New Season of Care", a digital programme; Zoom. 2021
Over three days, up to five participants at a time joined me for an hour-long bath on Zoom. Prior to our communal bath, I sent participants an etiquette list, bath recipes, tips on prepping their bathroom, readings, and some prompts.
After a solid year of pandemic-precipitated social distancing, the alienation that traditionally plagued lonely city-dwellers is now shared by most of us. We are painfully deprived of opportunities to share intimate time with people beyond our households, through endless lockdowns and other restrictions that will likely persist into the foreseeable future.
Technology enables us to stay connected, however it reduces us – for the most part – to talking heads. To combat our collective Zoom disembodiment, I propose that communal virtual bathing could help bring corporeality back into our social interactions, strengthen our fleshly connection to each other, and improve our mental and physical health in the process. Crucially, the virtual format of this hadaka no tsukiai (‘naked association’) or ‘skinship’ gives participants the freedom to decide how they wish to position themselves before their device’s camera. The bashful may choose to frame only their faces, or perhaps use filters that transform their appearance.
We have bathed communally for most of human history, and across most cultures of the world. Today, the act of collective bathing is still practiced in a handful of countries ranging from Japan to Chile, and from Morocco to Tibet. For the most part, however, cleaning our body is a solitary and functional task we perform with efficiency and haste. Skinship: A communal bath was a way to bring the pleasures of sociability back to our daily ablutions.
Image above: Home Bathing, Baron Raimund von Stillfried, Kusakabe Kimbei, circa 1870s -1890s