For the open studio day, VK Preston shares poetic writing on patients’ and families’ health-care experiences during the Covid-19 pandemic, reflecting on duration and the loss after their father’s passing in 2023. How is health care modeled on isolation injurious? What is cultural life and relationship in this time? Is there a right to cultural experience in challenging passages of life and against the institutionalization of our lives? “Between Water and Stone” shares practice through seasons of loss and the border between matter and solace.

VK is writing an academic book on dance and baroque politics at Camargo.

Correspondent Species is a multidisciplinary project that focuses on the sea both as an ever-changing biochemical habitat and a living entity. The current fluxus of underwater species and molecules foreshadows the imminent exodus of the people on the land above. Looking at the world’s ocean as a chimeric body of water made out of communicating vessels whose biochemical composition is affected by the hydro-political forces of the lands that surround it, Correspondent Species examines endemic and invasive water species and the fluxes that drive them. It follows my own migratory route from Beirut to Marseille to weave a new cartography around the bio-poetic.

Sara Kippur is a professor of postwar French literature in the U.S. While at Camargo, she is writing about Oppède, a site of a utopian experiment in 1940, when a group of artists collectively restored a medieval town in southeastern France that served as a safe haven during the war. Her aim is to write an experimental cultural history of an artists’ colony that existed in wartime France through the perspective of being part of an artists’ community today, with the threat of war in Europe not faraway. For the Open Studio, she will display some paintings, photos, and newspaper clippings about Oppède and, through a series of prompts, will invite visitors of all ages to reflect on their impressions and ideas of artists’ communities. This will be an informal event, where visitors can stop by for tea and conversation, or just to draw a picture.

This work is about redemption, strength, and resilience amid addiction, poverty, and street life. A comment on the times and the people who birthed civilization, the great Kingdoms of Africa, and how they fell and where they have been scattered. From the Valley of Kings to drug addiction, imprisonment, invisibility, and persecution, just for having frizzled hair. A neighborhood corner brutalized by police. A fragile society opposed by society. Souls Against the Concrete—poor but happy—misunderstood by society at large but still radiating the spirit of kings and queens. This collection of portraits represents a part of black history that shouldn’t be avoided—a small part of a great legacy that should be remembered. The struggles of the world desperately call for a different perspective on the problems we face. This work is the result of many nights spent with my Nikon F2 35mm camera on the corner at night. A photography style inspired by jazz: the improvisational click of the shutter fitting into the polyphonic symphony of the corner at night—equal parts psychiatry and photography.

Pneuma Ensemble will give a brief introduction to the work of a medieval music ensemble: what repertoires survive, what instruments are used, and what is the process of reconstruction. They will also introduce their Camargo project: the reconstruction of three narrative pieces from before 1150. None of these pieces survives with musical notation, but all come with a great deal of musical and cultural background.