7th edition, 2017–2019, Helen Cammock

I’m also looking for the strength and resilience in the lament.
Helen Cammock

For the seventh edition of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women, winning artist Helen Cammock (b. 1970), presented a film, a series of vinyl cut prints, a screen-printed frieze and an artist’s book. Interweaving women’s stories of loss and resilience with Baroque music by seventeenth-century female composers, her project explores the concept of lament in the lives of women across different lands and eras.

Che si può fare (What can be done), Cammock’s winning project for the Max Mara Art Prize for Women, takes its title from a pre-operistic lament written in 1664 by Italian composer Barbara Strozzi (1619–1677).

As a visual poet whose drawings, prints, photographs and films juxtapose words and images, Cammock’s artistic practice embraces text, photography, song, performance, and printmaking, to challenge traditional historical narratives around Blackness, women, wealth, power, poverty, and vulnerability.

The project is meant to evoke the power of female voices, from the Baroque era – through the music of two composers of the time, Barbara Strozzi and Francesca Caccini (1587-1641) – all the way to contemporary Italian society.

During the residency organized by Collezione Maramotti, Cammock moved between Bologna, Florence, Venice, Rome, Palermo and Reggio Emilia. Over the course of her stay, historians, musicians, artists and singers opened their archives to share their stories and research with the artist.

Che si può fare (What can be done)

Whitechapel Gallery (25 June–1 September 2019)

Collezione Maramotti (13 October 2019–8 March 2020)

The six-month residency organized for Cammock in Italy by Collezione Maramotti led to the creation of Che si può fare (What can be done), a project that explores the idea of lamentation and rediscovers hidden female voices.

Through a film, a series of vinyl cut prints, a screen-printed frieze and an artist’s book, Cammock tells the stories of women she met during her time in Italy. It is a diverse group, made up of activists, migrants, refugees, nuns and women who fought against Fascism. Their personal accounts are interspersed with pieces of music and footage shot in Italy during Cammock’s residency, forming a complex visual and oral collage. Three colour-saturated prints depict music and voices, while a six-meter-long painted frieze incorporates images and words connected to the figures in the film.

Cammock took classical singing lessons to learn Strozzi’s aria Che si può fare, rehearsing it over the entire span of her residency. For the opening of the exhibition, the artist performed the piece live. She was accompanied by a jazz trumpeter and by a group of women she met during her residency, who contributed to the performance with movement pieces choreographed to the arias of Francesca Caccini.

After the Max Mara Art Prize for Women, Cammock went on to win the Turner Prize in 2019 with Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Oscar Murillo and Tai Shani, and in 2023 received the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Artists.