To Learn To Dance With Fireflies, First Accept The Dark: 5 films by Helen Cammock

16 Jul-30 Aug 2025

Overview

Presented in conjunction with Connecting Thin Black Lines 1985 – 2025, To Learn To Dance With Fireflies, First Accept The Dark: 5 films by Helen Cammock brings together moving image works that trace, complicate, and reimagine histories of Black life, resistance, and creativity across time and geography.

The title is drawn from a print produced by Cammock as part of I Will Keep My Soul (2022), created during her residency with the Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art and Thought in New Orleans. The phrase invites a reckoning with what lies beneath cultural production – to understand the structural violence, silence, and appropriation that shape how we engage with the aesthetics and expressions of marginalised communities. It is a call to move slowly, to listen deeply, and to stay with the darkness that precedes illumination. 

Informed by archival research and intimate collaborations with artists, activists, and musicians, this body of work considers how cultural memory and lived experience intertwine. The season spans lyrical meditations on colonial history (There’s a Hole in the Sky Parts I & II), reflections on idleness as resistance (They Call It Idlewild), intergenerational dialogue (Changing Room), and the transformative potential of lament, as both emotional expression and political gesture (Che Si Può Fare).
 
The films collectively form a visual and sonic archive, attentive to both individual testimony and collective struggle. Across these works, Cammock mobilises film, voice, song, and text to unearth buried narratives and centre expressive forms often unheard. Cammock’s work offers not only critique, but also an invitation into new ways of seeing, feeling, and being in relation – with the past, with each other, and with the possibility of transformation. 

Curated by Black feminist artist-researcher, writer, and curator Nydia A. Swaby, To Learn To Dance With Fireflies, First Accept The Dark: 5 films by Helen Cammock invites a collective reckoning with the past and a reorientation toward futures shaped by relation, resistance, and radical tenderness.