Occidental College will host well-known Brazilian artist, composer, and theater director Octávio Camargo January 14 - March 3 to teach students, giver public lectures and collaborate with Los Angeles-based artists.
His residency on campus is the second of three such visits the College will host this academic year in conjunction with the Outpost for Contemporary Art, a local nonprofit arts organization.
Camargo, who teaches at the University of Music and Fine Arts in Paraná, will give four public lectures at Occidental, co-teach a course on experimental composition, and lead a College workshop in which students will help him collect, record, and translate works by poets, storytellers and singers into a project about memory and connection between artists and communities in Los Angeles and Brazil. That project will culminate in a performance at the College in early spring.
His lectures, which are free and open to the public, will be held at 7 p.m. in the Braun Room of Occidental College's Clapp Library, located at 1600 Campus Road, Los Angeles, 90041:
• February 2: "Oral tradition: The Legacy of Hellenism in the Development of Neo-Latin Languages"
• February 9: "Composition and Oral Poetry"
• February 16: "Site-Specificity and Urban Interventionism in Brazil"
• February 24: "Living Memory of At-Risk Groups and Communities"
In addition, Camargo will co-lead a nine-day online/in-person course, "Experimental Composition in Popular Music," for Los Angeles composers, songwriters, visual artists, musicians, singers, poets, and storytellers. Camargo will teach the class at the Outpost for Contemporary Art in Highland Park while Brazilian composer Chico Mello will teach from Brazil. For more information, contact Miranda Siegel at miranda@outpost-art.org or visit http://www.outpost-art.org.
The third group of artists, environmental organization Ala Plástica, will be in residence from late March through April. The collective will work with the College's urban and environmental policy, art, and theater departments on their research on the environmental effects of urban oil exploration. The first group of artists, two members of the Sao Paulo, Brazil-based arts collective Grupo Bijari, were on campus October 23 to November 21. The artists gave public talks, participated in Occidental classes, and created an art installation, "America Love Me," about 20 Los Angeles teenagers' immigration and education experiences.
The international artists' residency at Occidental is also supported by the City of Los Angeles' Department of Cultural Affairs; the University of Music and Fine Arts of Paraná; the National Performance Network; the Cultural Foundation of Curitiba; and Curitiba's Oficina de Musica.
For more information about Octávio Camargo, go to http://www.errantbodies.org/camargo.html.
