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Assembly 2024
Music
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Fri 22 Mar 2024
Performance 1: 19.00 - 20.30 Doors 18.30
Performance 2: 21.00 - 22.30 Doors 20.30
Lancaster Rooms
New Wing
Presenting two new commissions from Studios residents Nkisi and Shamica Ruddock.
Nkisi with Joshua Woolford
MA HA WISU, meet me at the crossroads
MA HA WISU, meet me at the crossroads is a multi-dimensional and sensorial experimentation in dance, movement, sound, music, sculpture and storytelling, blurring and blending the boundaries between ritual and musical gestures.
Exploring the immaterial legacies embedded within sound, artist and musician Nkisi collaborates with transdisciplinary artist Joshua Woolford in a new work for Assembly that sees music and dance used to decode and recode ancestral traditions and spiritual technologies.
BIO
BIO
Nkisi
Nkisi is a creative musician, psychic and artist based in London with Kongo roots. She uses sound as a way to explore the spiritual technologies embedded in music and dance and how to keep these alive. Rhythm, sound and noise are used as ways to activate kinetic traces of memory inscribed in and by the body in motion. Through the use of sensory codes, Nkisi merges music, performance and research in ancient musical technologies to invite audiences to dance with the invisible and activate embodied forms of revolution and resistance for the unmaking and making of worlds.
Joshua Woolford
Joshua Woolford is a transdisciplinary artist working between performance, painting, sculpture, sound, video, and installation. Woolford's work is rooted in extensive cultural research, drawing from literature, music, and art, as well as personal experiences of being a member of the queer Black Afro-Caribbean diaspora living in London. Alongside their artistic practice Woolford also takes on design commissions, lectures at London College of Communication (UAL) and is a mentor at the Royal College of Art through RCA BLK.
Through their practice, Woolford acknowledges and confronts experiences of violence, aggression, and misalignment through abstract forms and sounds, verbal language and the body. They embrace reflection, transition and movement as powerful and disruptive states that actively challenge prevailing narratives.
Shamica Ruddock
Shamica Ruddock presents a new work borrowing from her ongoing research on Maroon societies and their associated sonic practices. Working with sourced recordings, the sounds take shape from a selection of samples processed through a series of effects chains and arranged in real time. In their newly processed state, these samples provide a core foundation to build upon across the duration of the performance.
The work speaks to dub methodologies and versioning, and with remnants of former sounds embedded amongst newly composed excerpts, Ruddock’s composition also considers the retention of the West African rhythmic structures in Afro-diasporic music, and their presence or traces in contemporary Black sonic production.
BIO
BIO
Shamica Ruddock
Shamica Ruddock is an artist often found working between sound and moving image. Shamica’s current research concerns sound cultures and Black sonic modalities. Maroon histories, fugitivity and Black temporal entanglements have also proved resonant departure points. Shamica has presented work at South London Gallery, Treasure Hill Artists Village, Aesthetica Film Festival and Canal Projects in collaboration with artist Emilija Škarnulytė. Shamica has an ongoing sound based research project with artist Hannan Jones. Performances include Glasgow based contemporary music festival Counterflows, Silent Green Future Soundscapes Festival and Madeira Dig.
Approximate Stage Times
19.00 Shamica Ruddock
19.45 Nkisi
21.00 Nkisi
21.45 Shamica Ruddock
ACCESSIBILITY
If you have any accessibility requirements and have any questions, please contact our Visitor Experience team at Somerset House ahead of the event.
MA HA WISU, meet me at the crossroads is commissioned by Somerset House Studios and supported by PRS Foundation’s The Open Fund for Organisations.