Is Sweden’s Purple Crystal Sauna Making Climate Change… Fun?

The first line of T.S. Eliot’s seminal modernist poem "The Waste Land" is a prickly reversal of the first line in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, turning April from a month of healing to one of cruelty. It is in that vibrating tension that Wasteland, a climate-focused art park in Skellefteå in northeastern Sweden, lives; the park, which opened on May 28, aims to expose, nurture, and even satirize conversations around global climate change.

Wasteland sits on the banks of the Skellefte River in Scharins, a once-highly polluted industrial area that has recently undergone a sanitization and transformation that both confronts and subverts its Byzantine history. Known as Guldstaden ("Gold Town") for its gold mines, the city’s current major industries include copper mining and lithium-ion battery cell manufacturing. Not exactly the spot you’d expect green dreams to flourish; you’d be more likely to find Blinky the three-eyed fish from The Simpsons. But the climate park is recasting the site with temporary art exhibitions, an observation tower created in collaboration with the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, and—its central landmark—a sauna designed by renowned Swedish art duo Bigert & Bergström, made of gleaming magenta, titanium-plated steel and emerging from the ground in the shape of a giant cluster of lithium crystals.