Connecting Thin Black Lines 1985 – 2025

The final screening in the series To Learn to Dance with Fireflies, First Accept the Dark: 5 films by Helen Cammock  features Che si può fare (2019), a deeply moving and formally inventive work by Helen Cammock that explores lament as both an emotional expression and a political gesture. Interweaving women’s stories of loss and resilience with seventeenth-century Baroque music by female composers, the film reflects on how grief, resistance, and memory travel across histories and geographies. 

At its centre is a split-screen film that blends interviews with a diverse group of women Cammock encountered during her travels across Italy – social activists, migrants, refugees, nuns, and women who have lived through dictatorship. Their testimonies are layered with archival imagery, contemporary footage, and music, including the recurring refrain of Barbara Strozzi’s 1664 lament Che si può fare (What can be done). Cammock learned and performed the aria as part of her research, using song as a conduit for empathy and solidarity across time.
 
Both meditative and politically charged, Che si può fare speaks to the endurance of women’s voices and the emotional labour of survival. It embodies Cammock’s broader practice, which spans text, song, video and performance, and is rooted in a commitment to excavating unheard or overlooked narratives of Blackness, womanhood, power and vulnerability. 


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