.JPG)
As winner of the Max Mara Art Prize, Helen Cammock spent six months in Italy. She based her work on the lives of two women Baroque composers, Barbara Strozzi and Francesca Caccini. Both achieved fame in their lives but were until recently largely forgotten.
From their stories, Cammock settled on the theme of lament; Strozzi’s pre-opera lament Che si può fare lends the exhibition its title and at a performance on Monday — repeated during the show — Cammock sang it, accompanied by a jazz trumpeter. Centuries divide the Baroque and jazz, but you’d never know it from this sublime connection of voices. A recorded performance brings Cammock’s poetic and stirring three-screen film here to its close.
Voices dominate Cammock’s work; as sound, in activist speech, in poetry and prose, or in expressive movement. Prints here attempt to capture this through minimal lines, for instance. But it’s in the film that Cammock explores the multiplicity of voices she encountered in Italy so powerfully. They include the laments of Strozzi and Caccini, of course, and of Lucrezia Vizzana, a nun and Baroque composer whose music was silenced by the pope. But this isn’t a documentary about historic figures.
When in Italy, Cammock encountered numerous women who speak both of lament and resilience: a Bolognese woman who helped sabotage Nazi planes in Mussolini’s Italy; in Reggio Emilia, a woman who translated anti-apartheid South African literature; a Florentine choreographer who had not danced for 25 years but was convinced to perform and does so, wonderfully movingly; in Palermo, a Carmelite nun working with refugees.
A mood of longing is laced through this tremendous film but its abiding message is of inspiring resistance to oppressive forces.
Until Sep 1 (020 7522 7888, whitechapelgallery.org)
