Through regular collaborative workshops organized over three years, the groups experimented with drawing, music, and movement. They considered song and gesture as ways to communicate through the body and reflected on how the voice can shift registers to express pain, joy, rage, and care, whether alone or surrounded and supported by other voices. In a process that is documented throughout the film, the groups rehearse and eventually perform together, referencing the long history of singing as an act of collective self-care.
Bass Notes and SiteLines is part of Rituals of Speaking, a film-led series that explores how artists represent the voices of others through collective storytelling.
Images: Bass Notes and SiteLines: The Voice as a Site of Resistance and the Body as a Site of Resilience, stills (2022).
About the artist
Helen Cammock uses film, photography, print, text, song, and performance to examine mainstream historical and contemporary narratives about Blackness, womanhood, oppression and resistance, wealth and power, poverty and vulnerability. Her works often cut across time and geography, layering multiple voices as she investigates the cyclical nature of histories in her visual and aural assemblages.
In 2017, she won the Max Mara Art Prize for Women, and in 2019 she was the joint recipient of The Turner Prize. Helen has exhibited and performed worldwide including recent solo shows at the Whitechapel Gallery, The Photographer’s Gallery, and Serpentine Galleries (London, UK); Performing Arts Center STUK (Leuven, Belgium); Collezione Maramotti (Reggio Emilia, Italy); VOID (Derry, Northern Ireland); the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin, Ireland); Kestner Gesellshaft (Hannover, Germany); and Hamburger Kunsthalle (Hamburg, Germany).
