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Helen Cammock: They Call It Idlewild Extended II
They Call It Idlewild Extended II
(p. 47 – 70)

Helen Cammock

They Call It Idlewild Extended II

PDF, 24 pages

  • protest movements
  • artistic practice
  • contemporary art
  • resistance

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Helen Cammock

Helen Cammock is a multimedia artist based between Brighton and London. She works across film, photography, performance and print and her practice is characterized by its fragmented, non-linear nature; questioning mainstream historical narratives around Blackness, gender, wealth, power, poverty and vulnerability. Mining her own biography in addition to the histories of oppression and resistance with multiple and layered narratives, Cammock reveals the cyclical nature of histories. Her work makes leaps between different places, times and contexts, asking us to acknowledge complex global relations and the inextricable connection between the individual and society. Cammock was the recipient of the 7th Max Mara Art Prize for Women and joint recipient of The Turner Prize 2019.
Sebastián  Eduardo Dávila (ed.), Rebecca Hanna John (ed.), ...: On Withdrawal—Scenes of Refusal, Disappearance, and Resilience in Art and Cultural Practices

What forms does withdrawal—meaning either that which withdraws itself or which is being withdrawn—take in artistic and cultural practices? What movement(s) does it create or follow in specific contexts, and with what theoretical, material, and political consequences? The contributors of this book address these questions in a variety of writing practices, each focusing on specific scenes. These scenes are organized under three parts that structure the chapters: Passivity, Failure, and Refusal; Disappearance and Remembrance; Resilience and Resistance. Through interviews, artistic and literary texts, visual contributions, and academic texts, the authors explore various modalities of withdrawal ranging from a silencing of critical voices to a political and aesthetic strategy of refusal. The enforced disappearance of government opponents, for instance, may be implemented as a means of state violence, but withdrawing may also mean the decision not to participate in such violence, either through forms of passivity or refusal. Moreover, in the neoliberal logic of resilience, the relationship between subjective agency and imposition from the outside remains tense. The aim of this book is to tackle these tensions, as well as the ambiguities and complexities of withdrawal.

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