Camila Ortiz will perform original material that engages with Christopher Myers’ Let The Mermaids Flirt With Me at Art Basel Miami Beach. The work, a monumental site-specific installation, acts as a visual exploration of the varied mythological, spiritual, and historical relationships between Black bodies, diaspora, and water.
Ortiz is a composer, songwriter, performer, and educator based in New York. Spanning folk, pop, and avant-garde, her music employs words, colors, textures, and space to invite moments of reflection and emotional release. Her work has been featured by NPR’s All Songs Considered, Input/Output Magazine, and Various Small Flames. Ortiz’s piece Banishing Spell, created for a 40-channel speaker diffusion system, was performed at the Hydra Festival in Cambridge, MA, and Klang! Festival in Montpellier, France. In collaboration with Ian Askew, Ortiz has previously worked on sound scores for Christopher Myers’ The Art of Taming Horses, as well as KLII – a mytho-biographical performance that exorcises the ghost of King Leopold II – co-directed by Myers and Kaneza Schaal. Askew and Ortiz have also created scores for Kamal Nassif’s ALA EADHA, Kaneza Schaal, Joie Lee, and Jackie Sibblies Drury’s The Healing, and an AR introduction to Safia Elhillo’s Home Is Not a Country.