The Sweat Collective is a group of artists based on Larrakia Country in Darwin, Northern Territory, who explore innovative ways of creating and collaborating within the region’s unique environmental, cultural, and community context. They produce a biannual program of participatory, experimental, durational, cross-artform, and site-specific works that celebrate and examine the rituals associated with the Build Up—the period leading into the Wet Season. 
One of their key initiatives is Sweat Season, an annual event that carves out space for the creation of enmeshed experiences specific to the local place, environment, and people of Garrmalang/Darwin.
Sweat Originals:
Matty van Roden
Tony Lee
James Mangohig
Jenelle Saunders
Tarzan JungleQueen
Jess Devereux
Lee Harrop
Kelly Beneforti
Transient Sweats
Amina McConvell
Haneen Mahmood Martin
Gary Lang
Tamara Howie
Ciella Williams
Alicia Scobie
Cj Fraser Bell
Naina Sen
Sarah Pirrie
Sweat Collective
Sweat Season 2020-2021
Sweat Season chatbook created as a part of 2020-2021 program.
REFLECTIONS
Every year, as the air thickens and clouds begin to muscle their way across the skyline, Darwin leans into the Build Up—those strange, suspended months where time stretches, tempers fray, and everything seems to sweat: people, windows, thoughts. It’s a season like no other, and it asks something different of us—patience, adaptation, surrender.
Sweat Season grew from that space. It’s not just a program; it’s a ritual, a collective exhale, an experiment in what happens when we pay attention to the heat, the heaviness, and the thresholds of change. Around the world, seasonal shifts are marked with festivals and offerings—raining fish, reversing rivers. In Garrmalang/Darwin, we gather under a swelling sky and make art.
In 2020/21, the Sweat Collective came together—sometimes closely, sometimes from across rooms humming with fans—to explore what it means to create with place, not just in it. We spent time in solo research residencies, came together in an arts lab, developed new work, and eventually shared it as part of a collective program in February 2021. Through participatory, site-specific, cross-artform, and durational practices, we celebrated and interrogated the rhythms of the Build Up: the old, the newly forming, and the ones that feel impossible but necessary.
Sweat Season is messy, intimate, and utterly local. It holds the tension and beauty of a place that doesn’t just change with the weather—it transforms. This work asks us to transform too.
Thunder Between Dinners: A Story from the Third Cycle of Sweat Season
The wet lingered longer that year. Clouds hung thick like thoughts not yet spoken, and the city shimmered in lime green flushes of new growth. Thunder had been quiet, but when it finally arrived in March, it felt like a long-awaited exhale—a sonic permission slip to begin again.
This was the third cycle of Sweat Season.
By then, we knew a little more about what it meant to create with the weather, not just in it. To let sweat be a verb, a condition, a provocation. Each of us returned to the collective softened by the season, soaked in our own quiet inquiries. The idea was not to produce, but to listen. To move through experimental, place-based research with no pressure of outcome—only curiosity. We carried questions like talismans: Can a thought sweat? Can sound hibernate? What does it mean to chafe creatively, or offer shelter through art?
We gathered across the months—on storm-wet nights under tin roofs or in rooms humming with fans—for a series of dinners that doubled as laboratories. We shared meals and findings, ideas and irritations. We spoke of lightning and mould, of time stretched thin like humidity, of tenderness and thresholds. We made space for not knowing, for the fertile in-between.
There was no singular project. There was instead a collective rhythm—research residencies, shared provocations, and then the September arts lab, where everything began to take form. Or rather, many forms. The works that emerged were messy, beautiful, durational. They bore the imprint of the season: sticky, emergent, and full of slow thunder.
This cycle of Sweat was curated more deliberately, led with care but loose enough to leave room for the unpredictable—to allow the program to sweat, shift, and storm as needed. The glossary we developed (mould, rot, tide, chafe, shelter) didn’t just describe the season; it became a method. A way of being in creative relation to Larrakia Country.
Somewhere between the dinners and the downpours, between solitude and gathering, between the visible and what remained just below the surface, we practiced what it means to hold space. We learned that trust is like the wet: it comes in waves, seeps through cracks, nourishes what we didn’t know was dry.
The third cycle of Sweat Collective didn’t close with a full stop. It left us in a state of becoming—like the season itself—heavy with possibility.
