Kyle Keese & Michael Price
Having met at a countryside luncheon within the walls of the Château de Courances, Kyle Keese, an American artist living in France, and Michael Price, a London based designer-maker, erected sauna_000 in adherence to Kyle’s working birthday tradition.
Three fires tended and a fixin’ for a shvitz turned an ambition born out of a hangover into the first temple of sweat, and with a red balloon through Paris and a cabin made of feathers, Keese proposed to Price the quest of bringing the country to the city and the city to the country. From the Foret de Fontainebleau to Pantin and back again, the two strangers would spend every waking hour together, side-by-side, in an intensive labor-marathon at The Community House, a formerly abandoned house at 13 rue Méhul. Through the reparation of the property, the two fermented in the joys of labour, the act of doing, and the establishment of a community space inspired by the worker’s clubs of yesteryear. This artistic act of occupation set the course for the establishment of the Church of Work. There on the street named after the “romantic” composer himself, Etienne Méhul, Keese and Price turned a house into a home and that home into The Labor Temple. A brick and mortar response to a post-human world.