Full Transcript:
Dot Zhihan Jia: So last but not least, we have Shamica Ruddock. Shamica is an artist often found working between sound and moving image. Their current research concerns sound cultures and Black Sonic modalities. Approaching sound as a site of foreign knowledge production, they consider the way Afro Diasporas emerge through sound. They're particularly interested in how black technosonic production functions as a form of narrativising and world-making. Maroon histories, Fugitive and Black temporal entanglements have also proved resonant departure points. Recent solo and group presentations include Skene in Malmo, Sweden, and 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning, London, World Project in Margate, and South London Gallery. Okay, I'll hand over to you.
Shamica Ruddock: Hi, I'm Shamica. And as an artist, I position my practice as someone who is fundamentally responding to research through sound and moving image. And I often identify these as two of the core mediums. But often with a large emphasis on sound. But within this, there is text-based works, installations, and costume-making as well, more recently in the context of thinking through carnival, masquerade, which features a bit in the presentation. In general, I always find it impossible to summarise what's motivating my practice at any one time, and therefore, I thought it just makes sense to introduce my practice through a series of works and projects, starting with Deciphering a Broken Syntax, which was a work that was produced at the South London Gallery in 2022 as part of a six-month residency, part of the postgraduate residency they do. Which is basically six months work on a solo show. I started with this work as it often feels like it marks the beginning of this chapter of my practice. And all the works I've chosen today were chosen, perhaps, as in these works I feel like a lot of ideas within my practice become more fully formed or more fully realised.
So, Deciphering a Broken Syntax, is a work that brought together ideas on Black Techno-Poetics. So thinking through dynamics of race, hybridity, technology, and sound. It explored sound as a space for world-making and as a site of agency and reclamation for the Black diaspora or Black diasporas because they are multiple, they exist in multiple. And within my work, there's a consideration of sound culture and Black Sonic histories more broadly. The shape of this listendom itself was inspired by a calabash, often also called a bottle gourd. The calabash, for at least 10,000 years, it's thought, has been used in African and Caribbean cultures to eat, create domestic objects, and as a base for an array of innovative musical instruments, from Kalimbas to the Banjo. And yet it also has quite a spiritual significance related to cosmogony, the branch of science that deals with the origin of the universe, especially the solar system, and the curved forms of the calabash echo the shape scientists believe black holes take and it shapes them to an hourglass – devices for timekeeping.
For this particular work, direct reference is drawn from Jamaican-Canadian fiction writer, Nalo Hopkinson, who writes this in the book, Brown Girl in the Ring. She writes about the calabash as a portal between Guinea Land, and it's this place that's neither the real world or the spirit world. It's this in-between point where all these spirits linger looking for no home. The dome at the heart embodied a material manifestation of this. So thinking about it as this portal to this nether world suspended in sound. So thinking about this idea of space or spatial-temporal travel through sculpture, accompanying a considered soundscape, and also thinking on ideas of maroonage, which then becomes a core departure point in later work. The dome itself also provides an acoustic and enveloping quality. So these triangular panels [referring to image on screen] lined with reconstituted acoustic foam hold the sub frequencies. So it creates this quite dense, almost cocoon or womb-like sensibility. And the sub ends up being quite contained. So it ends up getting this quite heavy resonance through the body. And so here the architecture is channeling the music and signaling both physical and metaphysical journey, offering listeners a different space and context to consider the cultural poetics of sound. Maybe if we just go into the next one, that's just another image of this portal.
An interest in naming was also present with track names becoming almost like a storytelling device in this sonic fiction. And so names included ‘event A’, ‘Inward’, ‘Lurking’, ‘event B’, ‘Wading’, ‘Undergrowth’, ‘event C’, ‘Across from Within’, ‘event D’, ‘Recurrent’, ‘Thoroughfare’, ‘event E’, ‘Outwards’, and a recess, with this recess being both a break and a bridge, an attempt of interrupting a linearity. So introducing a loop and returning...This returns to a beginning. Here attempting again to play with the temporality and move away from nonlinear conceptions of time, which often come with very European implications, thinking a lot about the Greenwich meantime and where we adapted time conventions from. And so this idea of events was also thinking of event clusters, so potential for all these in some world to be happening at some time. So that's why they're called ‘event A’, ‘event B’. And also this image here [referring to presentation] was both an image that was a digital print that was on the wall of the gallery. But then if you go to the next one, it also became the artwork for the record because I'm quite interested in the record as an artwork, but also as a space for mapping research through inserts, and about how naming becomes just play of leaving traces of these stories or these research.
Perhaps if we go to the next slide, there's an excerpt that is from ‘Event B – Wading Undergrowth’. The whole soundscape, I guess, was about 29 minutes, but obviously We can't play that all. Here's a minute, I think. It plays off the laptop.
[Sound from laptop]
Shamica Ruddock: We should skip it because its not loud enough for the proper experience
[Sound is turned off]
Shamica Ruddock: Then another work that follows quite shortly after is this film, Something More Than Masquerade. This work sees a pivot, I guess, towards Caribbean folklore, Masquerade and folkways, thinking here as well about superstitions and proverbs. And beyond this, also present is interest in the meters and rhythms and cadence and intonations that occupy and provide a function in Caribbean orality, and thinking much here on Creolization, and that which provides emphasis and informs narration. So I guess in this previous work, I have been exploring the trope of sonic fiction, and fiction and fiction, a speculation of other worlds, but mostly manifesting as sound works. And this work, in some ways, still is preoccupied, I guess, with storytelling.
I think I have an interest in this potential storytelling as a form of knowledge production that sits outside, I guess, more institutionalised ideas of how you come to know. And just thinking about how an event might become historicised as well through the narrativising of it, thus becoming eventually knowledge that's held within a certain community or cultural context. This work itself, maybe if you go across one image, was made as part of this Kingston University, and I think it's the AHRC, Arts and Humanities Research Council, is that what it stands for, in partnership also with the BBC. And so the BBC, basically, as part of this centenary, offered a few people access to a selection of curated archive material. And it was an invitation to just work with the archive in any way you would like. And then, I guess, my background coming into the arts is actually, had a philosophy and working in museums and heritage and working for collections and archives for a bit. And I think I was always interested, or perhaps my journey into the arts came from this space of, I was wanting to resist how rigid, perhaps, it felt as if I encountered a lot of these archive materials in these spaces that had these narratives that felt quite fixed.
I guess I was also interested in the archive as perhaps being supplemented and updated with material that chance just to think differently about what the material might signal beyond that attributed narrative. So this work basically became a contemplation of contemporary carnival traditions and this visible erasure you get of traditional masks and the tropes and figures, as well as just a general lack of awareness around the origins of carnival for the Black diaspora from the Caribbean and across, I guess, what we call the Americas. So thinking about how this all came from places like rebellion and resistance, and there was this play of mimesis and copying, almost like poking fun and making fun at the overseers and the plantation. But in more modern, contemporary carnival culture, it's more just one big party, which always was then. But it's interesting. We go to Notting Hill carnival anyway, and it's just loads of people just there to get pissed. Anyway, so it was this work, and I guess this potential body work that this film points towards is attempting to sit with that and find ways to almost tell those narratives that are no longer available.
So yeah, and in this film, we meet a young Pierrot Grenade. He's actually my nephew, who I forced him to wear this costume. He really was not happy, but I did pay him. But yeah, there's a clip from the film if we go across, but I don't... Again, if there's not much audio, you don't have to watch it. And as you say, it's a mixture of Super 8 and then Archive and also these 16 millimetre camera-less experiments. Let’s watch 30 seconds with subtitles.
[audio from film] Scholar, speller, storyteller. Yes. Pierrot Grenade, that's my name. Watch how the people dem dance. Swollen colours clash. An intoxicated rhythm.
Shamica Ruddock: So yeah, that's I think maybe like a minute and a bit of a six minute film. And then the work that I'm going to end with is a work that was produced early this year. So I think this is from May/June time. And I guess it's the work that arguably brings me back to the gallery, brings me back to the context of sound in a gallery. Sorry, the context. Sound in a gallery context, because basically 2023, you can see this bit of a leap between 2022, 2024. I just spent a lot of time actually exploring sound in a live context. I had this invitation from this curator, Karin, who is based in Malmö in Sweden. It partly responds to the context of this gallery where it is on this main road, but also it allowed me to explore something that I've been sitting with for a while. Palimpses and Epithets at the crux centres on a dubplate and a locked groove. Dubplates are known for having quite limited lifespan. Often after about 30 rotations, in theory, 30 plays, you start to get a lot of surface wear. Sonic material that's held on the dub play can quickly become inaudible, eventually becoming an eclipse with this sound, this crackle that you get. Often it can be quite a bit warming, and can be quite irritating after a while. But I basically want to play with this. And a lot of grooves are often intended to stop the tone arm of a record player from going on to the label, damaging the needle. But you can also insert a sound into this space, which a lot of people do. Basically, with a locked groove, it allows for this continuous playback without interference, just so it creates this ongoing loop. Because it just resets each time. And as the record loops with time, the original sounds on dubplate deteriorates. I was interested in this idea of this potential new composition that comes to the fore. I was always interested in this notion of, maybe we can go to the next picture, actually, in this picture, of the palimpsest, so remnants of the old imbued with the new, similar in some sense to dub, or the process of overdubbing.
And so this work also expands ideas of nonlinear temporalities. Again, this idea of the metaphysics of presence. As this audio fades and the crackles have more of a presence, it's requiring a different form of attunement. The idea was basically for the whole show's duration, it's just playing nonstop. If you enter the opening and then you go, I think it was open for a month, at the end it has a different... It's like a different sonic sensibility. It's like attempting to, over a period of time, tune in to what's happening with the sound. There's also interest here in, I would say, ideas like rootlessness, with a focus on music concrete and time of no identifiable tonality. And also it starts to compete with sounds from the surrounding sonic environment, which was, I don't know, for me, was challenging us to consider the incidental as part of the whole. And also thinking of the collapse of both the past and the present as a feature. So as the surface disintegrates, the original becomes concealed, but it's still very much present. And also this was a way for me to expand ideas of the say of repetition, difference, and hybridisation, which is a real interest in my work.
And as these processes of cultural production, this merging of these sounds, these crackles cover up this original sound, and then also the road, the cars going by. The gallery is also at the bottom of an apartment building. So also potentially these sounds are coming from families, like exiting around this gallery space. It's how all these sounds come together to provide a new... I was interested in that as an experience that might be related to this thing of hybridity. And also an interest in themes of... We can probably go across as well. So this is This is the dubplate, and if you can look closely, there's this... I did four just in case it wears out too soon, but it didn't. But essentially, it's just one... You can see the groove. And also interesting themes like dislocation as this original sound has become no longer locatable and new sounds pertaining to a specific geographical site merge. At the same time as well, I felt like Malmo as a space. I went in April to visit. I spent a week there, I was walking around, and it felt quite an interesting space. There's a lot of...
Because migrant communities that live there, but equally, it has its own very non-descriptiveness. I felt like, as a space, it was quite referentially, quite vacant. It just felt like it was absent of any set point of histories. I don't know. The only familiar sound I felt walking through the city was the sound of the pedestrian crossing. I don't know if you've been there, but that's the only thing that... You know how sometimes in London, you hear a siren and the sound of the Oyster card beeping, the sounds that you attribute to... For me, in Malmo, the only thing was the pedestrian crossing.
I guess... Yeah, there's some bits that I'm not going to say about. Then I was just going to add a little end to it. If you go to the... Sorry, that was the show. If you just go again. There is a... I'm not going to make us listen to sound off the laptop because I had a good... I also feel very… When it comes to sound,... I wouldn't want it to be heard in that way. So I'm also not going to do that. But if there were two speakers, then that'd be different. But anyway, so not to be that person, but if anyone wants to exhibit this work [laughter}. I, separate from this, do have live performance practice, both as a solo artist and also, I have this core-collaborator. I have a very co-conspirator, we always joke about being in cahoots. I thought I'd just share as an end, if you go on to the next image and next one again. It's just from that part of my practice, which is an extension of this, but also perhaps a way of just showing traces of what else is there or other ways, other space that I occupy as an extension of the practice. If we go across, we did a residency at CCA in Glasgow for three weeks and then worked with Lizzie, I think they're actually called Rectangle, her actual design agency to create this website that is mapping research and is playing around with ideas like scores and it's like sounds that we've recorded, some live improvisations. Then if you go to the next slide, there's an essay that we've written that is basically pieced together from correspondences because we lived once upon a time in Margate for a brief period, and then since we've never lived in the same location, and often... There's even one time when she was in London, I wasn't in London, because I was elsewhere. So we're always often corresponding through either WhatsApps or emails or voice notes. So it was this essay conversation that we sewed together from these various forms of... I don't know, it just felt like, again, though, an extension of the way we are as people as well as our practice. And then if we just go... Or maybe that's the last thing. Yeah, that's it, everyone. Cool. [laughter] Thank you.
