Assunta and Lou’s After School Art Club, test workshop with children and parents/guardians at BACKLIT, Nottingham, UK

Assunta and Lou's After School Art Club is a transportable participatory studio for art workshops delivered by Assunta Ruocco and her 8 years old daughter Lou. It is made up of a quilt, cushions, and aprons printed with some of our drawings and mixed media works, and digital printer copier which allow us to share our methods, developed during our 4 year long collaboration, of making collaborative works by layering interventions with traditional media and simple digital technology, for example making new compositions straight on the scanner glass. Sitting on the quilt and cushions and wearing digitally printed aprons participants are invited to explore our methods and transform our drawings.

The work can be animated by a live workshop for either adults or children and their parents/guardians, or could be displayed as an installation.

Installation info: the quilt, cushions, art materials and prints lie on the floor, the printer/copier plugs into power socket. Aprons could be displayed or just used for the workshop.

During lockdown, Assunta Ruocco’s home studio became a space for art and childcare. Unable to work indipendently, Assunta began a collaborative practice with her daughter Louise. Using the household scanner and printer, their drawing evolved through layering interventions and exchanges. Recently, Louise has developed new techniques with the printer/scanner. The mother-duaghter duo are nos experimenting with involving other artists and collaborators in their process. 

For this work, artist Ellen Angus was invited to the studio to choose one amongst hundreds of drawings. The drawing chosen by Ellen was then digitally printed by Assunta on translucent silk, and turned into a wearable artwork, exhibited here within BACKLIT’s members exhibition in July-August 2024, titled by Ellen ‘After Lee Krasner’.

2024 Mirrors, Windows, Portals, group exhibition curated by Assunta Ruocco and Alison Lloyd,at Project Space Plus, University of Lincoln with support from Derby Quad. With Alison Lloyd, Ellen Angus, Giulia Damiani + Le Nemesiache, Janhavi Sharma, Our Days of Gold (Assunta Ruocco + Daniel T. Wheeler), Sofia Yala

Mirrors, Windows, Portals brings together an intergenerational group of artists exploring embodied approaches to the photographic archive. The exhibition is the culmination of conversations between Assunta Ruocco and the late Alison Lloyd, about the commonalities in their projects re-animating photography archives. Both artists made large bodies of photographic work when at art school or shortly after, respectively in the early 2000s, and in the late 70s, which they shared through social media in recent years as @romilly_crescent_docs and @ourdaysofgold_film. In developing the exhibition, Lloyd and Ruocco questioned how artists’ archives might become contemporary, or images from the past might help configure the way we think of ourselves in the present and project onto the future.

The invited artists have practices that draw on personal and photographic archives, and work either alone or collaborating with friends and family, to create speculative and observant images of self. The exhibition features a variety of approaches to still and moving image, including performance, 35mm slide projection, chromogenic prints, video and installation.

Mirrors, Windows, Portals breaks from the axis of Mirrors and Windows (1978), between photography as ‘mirror, reflecting a portrait of the artist who made it, or a window, through which one might better know the world’ established by John Szarkowski in the seminal MOMA exhibition exploring American photography after 1960. Instead of signifying an approach that sees photography as an expression of the artist’s interiority, reflective surfaces such as mirrors and bodies of water become openings or thresholds to another reality. Clapton Pond, in Ellen Angus’s video work Darling You Will Always Win (2019) becomes a transformative space where the digital archive of a relationship breakdown is repurposed through a process of self-re-creation. In Sofia Yala’s work There is No Signal (2021), the mirror is a tool for evoking the past through distanciation, seeking to resist the colonial violence of photographic identification that was visited upon the artist’s grandfather. Assunta Ruocco’s Our Days of Gold archive, made with her family in the early 2000s, lends itself to a myriad interpretation. For this rendition of the work, Ruocco invited fellow artist Daniel T. Wheeler to choose a series of negatives from the archive, from which he produced darkroom prints that reflect his own distinctive point of view on the narratives, people and places of Ruocco’s past. Janhavi Sharma is building a record of her visits to familiar people and places through digitally enhanced photographs and moving image, all the while unsettling expectations of the digital as a vehicle to record and memorise the world.

The 1977 film The Sybils by Neapolitan feminist group Le Nemesiache, sees them inhabit the grotto of the Cumean Sybil near Naples through the staging of a re-imagined feminist mythology, in turn re-animated by artist Giulia Damiani’s embodied, performative response and contemporary contextualisation.

In Alison Lloyd’s 35mm slide installation Romilly Crescent, 1979, windows are looked at rather than looked through: the bay window of the young artist’s bedsit becomes a brightly lit theatre, where she fearlessly performs a dance for the adventitious audience of buses and passers-by. Captured by a friend, the performance joined a corpus of photographic works that, never exhibited at the time, were recontextualised in recent years. Lloyd says of another early piece, Constellations Street or Claude Road, Cardiff 1976:

I am probably with Jake. I directed the shots I may have used a timer. I could say now that she is ‘marking time’ or ‘making a place’. Whatever I say it’s of now and all that I’ve learnt since about art and life. Overlaying what I know now over what I had no idea I knew then. I’m a recent art student (trainee artist). She is finding her way, she made the outfit buying colourful net from the covered market in the centre of town, near the church. It is such a long time ago and it’s only now as I look at the 35 mm slides, late at night with the light from an old angle poise, also bought in Cardiff from a junk shop. Only now that I can say it is a series – an art work (@alisonlloyd Instagram post, 17 June 2018).

The photographic archive as a whole becomes a mirror in which to recognise oneself, a window through which to look at the present, and a portal to another world. By entering this creative relationship with the archive, the artists in Mirrors, Windows, Portals show how embodied knowledge can be activated, ‘new forms of being with others’ imagined, and alternate worlds evoked across time and space (Azoulay 2011).

This two person exhibition reflects on issues around authorship, collaboration, and the relationship between artists, technicians and technologies. Daniel T. Wheeler is a photographer and an excellent lab technician, well versed in the now rare art of colour printing. He selected and hand printed negatives from Ruocco’s photographic archive, which consists of thousands of images made between 2002 and 2007 and which she has been sharing on Instagram as @ourdaysofgold_film in the past 2 years.

Ruocco is an artist that employs different strategies to outsource artistic decision making and involve other people, machines and technologies into making work with her. She is interested in how contingent constraints, such as an artist’s domestic circumstances and the availability of studio space or equipment, play a role in the emergence of new artworks.

Our Days of Gold was born out of the coming together of the availability of a social media platform, Instagram, that paradoxically fostered the growth of communities around an ‘obsolescent' medium such as analogue photography; and the development of commercial scanner technology so that film negative scanning has become accessible and affordable.

Leaving the digital realm and collaborating with a photographer who still cultivates the skills involved in hand printing, and asking him to print whichever negatives he wanted from those I have scanned and shared on Instagram, was a way to reflect on the technological mediations involved in making and exhibiting photographs today. Wheeler has given his own interpretation of the archive, and he has selected images that document family life and its rituals. His selection is an exploration of gender identity, at the turning points of middle age and adolescence.

Re-imagining Citizenship is a collaborative project initiated and produced by the Politicized Practice/Anarchism/Theatre Activism Research Groups based at Loughborough University.
The Re-Imagining Citizenship Activity Book/Re-imagining Citizenship Living Archiveforms part of an ongoing dialogue around themes related to art and political activisms. Since 2014, artists, researchers and associates of the three Research Groups have organised events, installations, performances and participatory activities to explore the potential for art practices to re-imagine citizenship. These culminated in a series of activities during Brexit ‘deadline’ week in March 2019.

The Re-imagining Citizenship Activity Bookis a risograph publication designed by Carole Thomachot with coordination by Assunta Ruocco. Thirty contributors have devised a range of different activities, inviting readers to respond creatively to sets of instructions (using text, video, sound or graphics) and upload them to www.re-imagining.org. The book is displayed in the Re-Imagining Citizenship Activity Station, an installation by Assunta Ruocco, Zak Jones, Johanna Hallsten, and Chiara Dellerba. The project is exhibited within the group exhibition Personal Structures, at the Venice Biennale, European Cultural Centre, Palazzo Mora, from 11 May to 24 November 2019.

For Art Brussels, c-o-m-p-o-s-i-t-e proposes a ‘re-work’, a group work more than a group show. We invited the 6 artists that we have collaborated with since our opening: Olivia Dunbar, Ninar Esber, Hamza Halloubi, Emmanuelle Lainé, Kato Six, Assunta Ruocco, to participate in a collaborative project, initiated in c-o-m-p-o-s-i-t-e’s exhibition space during a week long collective work period. The installation includes pieces we coproduced with the artists over the course of the past programme, traces from the artworks’ own fabrication, and materials which sedimented in our storeroom. The aim of Heterarchical

Archipelago is to performatively create a protocol allowing the artists to enter each others ‘black box’ – the intimacy of their practice and media – and see if any of the elements found there stick in order to create new assemblages. A bench by artist Anna Barham, modeled on the gallery’s existing architectural features introduces c-o-m-p-o-s-i-t-e’s exhibition space as an actor by transposing part of it into the art fair itself. We consider the whole installation a metaphor of recollection, thinking through c-o-m-p-o-s-i-t-e’s activities. As such, it suggests an artificial re-composition of our first year’s programme, while also enacting the virtualities it still contains.
http://www.c-o-m-p-o-s-i-t-e.com/art-brussels-2015/