Shamica Ruddock is an artist often found working between sound and moving image. Shamica’s current research concerns sound cultures and Black sonic modalities.
Approaching sound as a site for knowledge production, she considers the ways Afro-diasporas emerge through sound. She is particularly interested in how Black technosonic production functions as a form of narrativising and worldmaking. Maroon histories, fugitivity and Black temporal entanglements have also proved resonant departure points. Selected presentations include the Barbican Centre (UK), Treasure Hill Artist Village (TW), Tate Britain (UK), and Aesthetica Short Film Festival (UK). In 2022 Shamica had a solo show with the South London Gallery titled Deciphering a Broken Syntax, producing a 4 track vinyl record of the same name. Residencies include Amant Foundation (US), Black Cultural Archives (UK), Somerset House (UK) and QO2 (BE). In 2021 Shamica was a British Library Eccles Centre Visiting Fellow researching Maroon sound cultures.
In The Shadows, There Is A Freedom (A pt2)
2024
This sound work builds on ongoing research on Maroon societies in the Americas. Maroon settlements, inherently fugitive in nature, remained sites of refuge for Maroon communities away from the plantations. Rejecting the placehold of slaves, often relocating to dense bush areas, and always maintaining originary claims to Africa, Maroons were fundamentally 'Unseen Guests' in strangelands. Existing as outliers, traipsing along the peripheries, the Maroons were able to survive retaining arguably direct access to ancestral cultural expressions despite a reality shaped by distance and dispossession.
This work plays on the notion of Maroon sonic technologies as coded communication, bringing together processed recordings of drumming both found and from the artist's own archive. Navigating the site, similar to the Maroons movements, sounds appear and disappear, move in and out of the shadows to locate.
