Helen Cammock on her songwriting workshops with women

Helen Cammock’s art reassesses the role of women in politics across the world. Her Turner Prize–winning film, The Long Note (2018), represents women’s various efforts in Northern Ireland’s Civil Rights Movement. A recent exhibition at Art and Practice in Los Angeles titled “I Will Keep My Soul” (and a book of the same title) juxtaposes the story of Elizabeth Catlett’s statue of Louis Armstrong in New Orleans with archival materials from civil rights organizers and musicians. And her film Bass Notes and SiteLines, on view at Amant in Brooklyn through June 18, explores the ethics of care as modeled by Cammock’s workshops with women who are at risk of or have been separated from their children.

MY DAD WAS BORN IN CUBA, where he was happy. Then I understand there was a hurricane. Any family not originally from Cuba had to leave. He was forced to migrate to Jamaica, where his parents were born. His family lost their sewing business. He received a scholarship and walked to school over the mountains, with bare feet all by himself in the dark, every day. One day he found a cat with a badly cut face. He carried it home and sewed its face back together. His mum died when he was twelve. She was taken to hospital and he never saw her again. He told us this when we were young; that was the beginning of my understanding of a lack of care in a political and historical sense.

When I was young in London, our home was sometimes full of laughter and always full of conversation. I was happy in school. I learnt instruments. I played sports. Then we moved to the countryside of Somerset. We were pretty isolated and at times ostracized. We were racially bullied. My dad’s mental health depleted. At different moments, we found our way and made good friends, but it was a real shock.

We had lots of political conversations around the dinner table. My dad talked about South Africa, apartheid, the African National Congress. I became a member of an anti-apartheid organization in the southwest as a teenager. He talked about Northern Ireland. He showed us the news, and we unpacked those things. I carried that with me. I was a folk singer, then a social worker. I worked for something called a “play unit,” where we played with kids outside at different public housing estates. I worked at a Family Center, doing individual sessions, a sports group for parents with mental health issues and a cooking group for women with learning difficulties and case holding. Also for a domestic violence project with women and children (a lot of whom had speech delay difficulties). We used disposable cameras to make images that captured what they felt and what they wanted to say. Then they could talk about their feelings in relation to what the image was doing.

Eventually, I went back to school to study photography and film. And developed an art practice. A few years ago, I spoke with a curator at Serpentine Galleries, who asked if I would work with social and health care workers in Barking and Dagenham as part of Radio Ballads. I did, but it felt like the story wasn’t full and complex enough. It needed people who were receiving care to be a part of that conversation.

I wanted to think about care in a way where it is not devalued and not weaponized. Pause [a London-based program which supports women at risk of or who have been separated from their children] worked with women who were ostracized. They were mainly working class, though of different races. Some had been in foster systems. Some had been in violent relationships. From our conversations, my understanding is that many of them had experienced a politically and historically produced lack of social and emotional care.

At first, the women would not come regularly to our workshops. Then I brought in a photo studio. People could work behind the camera if they didn’t want to be in front. They could work in teams or pairs, or by themselves. We talked. We built a series of workshops around trying to articulate through different creative forms. Soon enough, the women came regularly. All the while, I filmed. Then we started thinking about music, which the women said enabled them to be with their feelings without having to go into them, and to share feelings without having to say them. We began writing a song very slowly, using different games and activities. It brought the group even more tightly together and soon enough the women were arriving before me to sessions.

By the time I sat down to edit my footage into a film, the woman had, in a way, drafted it. I wanted every single person who participated to be in the film somehow, even if they didn’t want to have their voices heard or their faces seen. I wanted to capture the sensation of what was happening with us. I wanted to articulate my ideas about having a voice, being able to use your voice, and having your voice heard. We debuted the film and performed the song about a year ago, and still the women come back. They want to finish the job they started. We are currently recording and cutting a vinyl of the song.

Pause starts a cycle of care. The women accessing services have eighteen months of support. Then they’re invited to become mentors to other women. They tell each other, “You have value.” That’s part of what I wanted to do with this film. I wanted people to feel like they would like to be a part of that in some way. It’s transformative. A curator who saw the film told me that she never sings. But after watching the film, she sang loudly all the way home.

— As told to Elias Rodriques