Interno
Sara Morawetz
In the third episode of Interno, Mariam Arcilla speaks with Sara Morawetz, a New Mexico-based Australian artist, investigator, and method maker. Sara explores the emotional and psychogeographical forces behind scientific action and systems to create durational performances and exploratory research. Conducted over Zoom, Sara reflects on her first-hand experience of coronavirus, her collaborations with NASA scientists, and why university arts degrees are crucial for Australia’s creative currency. This episode also explores how the artist uses her body as an apparatus and an archive to create works that unveil the processes of methodological labour.
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Sara Morawetz is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the processes that underpin scientific action. She approaches experimental investigation as a way of thinking and working, and aims to deconstruct the underlying processes of methodological labour – to explore the exhaustive, the obsessive, the poetic, and the absurd inherent within scientific activity.
The Australian-born, New Mexico-based artist has collaborated with scientists from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Research Centre, NY, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (USA). Sara is also a PhD candidate at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney and an Australian Postgraduate Award recipient. She was the 2016 winner of ‘the churchie’ National Emerging Art Prize and receipt of the 2017 Vida Lahey Memorial Travelling Scholarship (QAGOMA Foundation). In 2019, Sara spoke at TEDx Sydney about her monumental performance project, étalon, which saw her walk from Dunkirk to Barcelona for 112 days in search of the metre.
Interno Episode 3
Guest: Sara Morawetz
Appearance by: Sharne Wolff
Producer & Host: Mariam Arcilla
Soundtrack Music: ‘Step Inside’ by Paper Plane Project
All images courtesy of Sara Morawetz and Dominik Mersch Gallery