Community Sweat
Sweat Season Cycle One (2019) Various work by Sweat Collective artists and community members, curated by Britt Guy. Images by Jess Devereux, Paz Tassone and Duane Preston.
Sweat Season, an ongoing body of practice, foregrounds collaboration between 14 artists (The Sweat Collective), the site of Larrakia Country (in all of its rich social, political and environmental multiplicity), the local climatic season called the Build Up and the people that call Larrakia Country home. Sweat Season facilitates opportunities for these collaborators to intra-act creating rituals, dialogues and exchanges unique to the specific ecology.
Sweat Season embraces the Larrakia Country and elemental cycles, and questions the institutional/societal cycles that work with and against the act of collaboration. It works towards developing processes and producing work that sit in between existing artistic, social, environmental and political binaries. It focuses on multi/trans/inter/intra-disciplinary art and cultural outputs that ignore traditional stages of development and presentation, rather leaning into an ongoing notion of experimentation, sampling, responding and exploring with no set linear order or end point.
This project to date has produced collaborative new media works, permanent public artworks, new music, dance and performance works, community events and an art book – as well as producing new collective ways of being as a multicultural community living on Larrakia Country.
For the 2021 Sweat Season, I was talking with cultural advisor and artist Tony Lee about the sites and projects other artists as part of the collective were making. Each year he works through each location, sharing traditional stories, local insights and his own ideas about the potential works and this then informs and sometimes completely reframes the works being made.
We were talking about the WWII Tunnels at the waterfront and he noted that close by was a women’s site, so he could not talk about this location nor would he be able to visit the work there. He recommended I talk with his sister Bilawara about this. Bilawara came on board the project to discuss this site.
Through my conversations with her and Tony I asked if they would like to produce a collaborative collection of Welcome to Country audio works that we would use at each site across the season. The aim being that they would provide both a welcome but also start to share more broadly local traditional stories of sites across Larrakia country.
We all met at Studio G in Stuart Park with another Sweat Collective member James Mangohig to recorded the audio. In my head we would produce six audio works, one for each site. We talked about each site and then decided to begin recording. Bilawara and Tony began to discuss places, traditional story, personal intertwined histories, rituals and seasons. The conversation was layered, multiple in site, place, language. The work produced was 10mins long and was presented at each site, across Sweat Season.
“They are all connect to one another” - Tony
“The whole coastline is pretty special to us; it is all around us” – Bilawara
“It is all connected, and very important to us” – Bilawara
“Wouldn’t like to decide where each site ends and divvy that up” - Tony
“They blend into each other, they cross, they merge” - Bilawara
“See unlike Western world that puts up fences, and a structure and that’s that. For us we merge throughout the whole environment, mind body spirit.” - Bilawara
“We just don’t have this spot, that spot, this spot, that spot – it all blurs, it crosses, intertwines.” - Bilawara
“It is basically seven levels – above, below” - Tony
Tony and Bilawara provided me with insight into a lived practice of living on country, within a constellation of knowledge and relationships. As Thomas van Dooren notes when discussing Haraway’s Staying with Trouble (Haraway, 2016) “attentive storytelling in which (re)description becomes a kind of theory” (van Dooren, 2018, p. 92). This idea of (re) description continues to reshape my thinking about collaborators and my interest in foregrounding place and elements in collaborations, in order to shift the way, we see people and places, with the hope we then make more responsive ‘connected’ policy based on diverse constellation of ongoing re/learning of stories.