Red Spruce Salt Marsh Station

Red Spruce Salt Marsh Station is an instance of artist Sara Smith’s larger multimedia project Inside the Breath (In Network Time), set in a future era called INT. At the heart of this project are questions about the physical, political, and spiritual implications of understanding humans as part of an interdependent system—with one another, with other species, and within Earth’s ecosystems.

Smith developed the core ideas of the INT world by mapping aspects of octopuses’ sensory-perceptual abilities to the writings and ideas of the queer Chicana activist and scholar Gloria Anzaldúa. In INT, animal and bacterial communication networks make our shared existence possible. 

This exhibition imagines that we are living in the care networks of INT and invites us to consider how we might collectively reach toward a more just, ecological, and actively interconnected existence. What pathways are possible from here to INT? What must we shift?

Sara Smith creates speculative-documentary performances and other works that explore interconnection and the poetics and politics of embodied and archival research. Their working process is rooted in physical practices of micro-attention and relational transformation. Sara’s artworks have been seen and heard in theaters, museums, studios, public parks, recreation center basements, and cloud-based platforms.

Smith is a transdisciplinary choreographer and librarian. They have been a recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship award in Choreography, and of support from The LEF Foundation, Maine Arts Commission, NEFA, the Puffin Foundation, and residency fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, Hewnoaks, and The American Antiquarian Society. From 2010-2017, Sara edited KINEBAGO, a forum for writing by and about New England dance makers and movement researchers.