B Cell City

CAM Art Co., New York, is celebrating six decades of boundary-pushing multimedia art with this three-day event. The three-day evening programme centres on excerpts from ‘B Cell City’, which is presented here as an immersive multimedia video art installation exploring the themes of life and cancer. Based on an original collaborative work by the company’s founder, Charles Matz, and its current director, Antonio Lai da Teulada, the exhibition features shout poetry, ambient sound design and live performances by an international line-up of artists from NYC, Berlin, Parma, Barcelona and Venice.

· Thursday, 29 October, 7.00 pm – Opening night

Performance by New York soprano Darynn Zimmer. Zimmer will recite passages (in English and German) from a libretto written for a secular oratorio. She will be accompanied by classical and jazz flautist and composer Michael Laderman, who lives in New York and Berlin.

· Friday, 30 October, 7.00 pm – ‘In Company of the Poets’

On the second evening, a multilingual word-and-music concert will be presented, based on a Spanish epyllion written by Matz. Inspired by the title of Eichendorff’s 1833 novel ‘Dichter und ihre Gesellen’ (Poets and Their Companions), Matz’s latest poetic work, “In Company of the Poets”, reflects on Alexander von Humboldt’s historic 1799 expedition to Cumaná and Caracas, drawing on passages from Humboldt’s 1810 work “Vues des Cordillères et Monuments des Peuples Indigènes de l’Amérique”. The performance weaves together Baroque and indigenous influences. The text is recited by Cristina Fernandez, an artist based in Barcelona and Berlin, accompanied by Daniel De Sousa, a member of the Venezuelan band La Vida Bohème.

· Saturday, 31 October, 7.00 pm – Closing event

The anniversary programme concludes with a performance by the international multimedia and video artist Clare Ann Matz. As the video artist behind the visual projections of CAM Art Co., she will combine her own Italian and English multimedia material with live performances of her father’s historic, early ‘shout poems’ in her set.