The opening stanza of Derek Walcott's Names slices through waves breaking on the windward side of Barbados, the landing point for the first black slave society: “A sea eagle screams from the rock, and my race began like the osprey, with that cry, that terrible vowel, that I.” Travelling inland from the shore, the narrator of Helen Cammock's essay film—always speaking in the first person, whether as herself or as the embodiment of other voices (from writers to emigrants)—searches for the last vestiges of the sugar trade, a colonial project in freefall. Combining drama and documentary, Twilight City, a Black Audio Film Collective production broadcast on British television two years into Margaret Thatcher’s third term, is composed of archival material, interviews with a diverse group of academics and activists (including Vancouver’s former city planner Andy Coupland), dream sequences, and footage of contemporary London captured by a fictional journalist who describes what she sees in a letter to her long-absent mother.
There’s a Hole in the Sky Part IUnited Kingdom 2016Helen Cammock19 min. DCPTwilight CityUnited Kingdom 1989Reece Auguiste52 min. DCP
Programmed by Michèle Smith
“Fragmented narration underlines Helen Cammock’s videos, performances, and installations—quoting, singing, ventriloquising, a procession of voices that successively inhabit the artist.”Chris Fite-Wassilak, Art Monthly
“[Twilight City] roves restlessly through the streets, casting a harsh gaze on crumbling public estates and growing corporate monstrosities. The interviewees become the voice of the city itself, crying out in indignation as its character and colour are purged for the sake of an unstable market.”Dan Schindel, Hyperallergic
