camille norment studio

Untitled (Flame) is part of an expansive, ongoing project that continues Norment’s exploration of feedback in relation to revolution, evolution; power structures and enlightenment.

In Chicago, it takes shape as two complimentary presentations: Untitled (red flame), a commissioned exhibition at the Logan Center Gallery (Nov 15, 2019–Jan 5, 2020), and Untitled (blue heat), a performance of Camille Norment and Hamid Drake, at the Renaissance Society, the week 9 – 14 December 2019.

In Untitled (fed flame), a darkened room surrounds visitors with the sound of a roaring fire, a vast and powerful force defining the space as it tremors through the bodies in its presence. A small cluster of red megaphones crackles a silent noise in the heat.  The soundscape is made up of abstractions of the voice and other sound produced by the body sounds such as hair, nails and teeth.  It is an enactment of the performative body, a body that is acting with agency.

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  Sonic feedback is resultant of the near instantaneous multiplication of a sound back onto itself, a dynamic process of ‘autopoesis’ in which the sonic timber is also shaped by the environment and the bodies in it.  In times of crisis, it can be said that the voicings of the global zeitgeist similarly spread rapidly like wildfires from mind to mouth, to ear, to mind, to mouth, to piercing scream, and to the body’s silent roar.

  This burning can also be experienced as the slow, deep warming of an essential core of change, a collective solar plexus – the body’s fire - nourished to raise a new consciousness out from the sweeping psychological noise of hysterical times. It too, is shaped by the environment of cultures and societies in its midst.

  It takes a spark to ignite a flame.

  Special thank you to the volunteers from Chicago’s South side who lent this project their heat:

  Zahra Baker
  Olivia Blocker
  Rashayla Marie Brown
  Jazmine Harris
  Lavon Pettis
  Anayansi (Elle) Ricketts
  Brandon Sherrod
  Sarah Beth Woods