‘Re-Imagining In-Conversation’ is a project between artists and dreamers Hannan Jones and Shamica Ruddock.

Hannan Jones is an interdisciplinary artist whose research motivations encompass peripheral narratives, often drawing parallels of personal and collective histories; and navigating this from the perspective of hybridity through language, rhythm, and psycho-geography.

Shamica Ruddock is a research responsive artist concerned with African-Caribbean folk storytelling practices, orality, African-centred time-space cosmologies, sound culture, hauntology and Black technopoetics and technosonic production. Sonic strategising and speculative world building are also important points of departure.

Through the medium of sonics, alongside a consideration of spatial dynamics and world making, they reimagine the ‘in-conversation’.

What you find here is a momentary assembling of sonics, visual cues, research, scores, from a single iteration that took place at the CCA Glasgow in August of 2021.

This particular iteration has been grounded in the core text Female Voices in Revolution: Autobiography and Collective Memory in Assia Djebar’s Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade and Merle Collins’s Angel; a text placing the orality of Algeria in relation to the oral traditions of the Caribbean.

Navigating this site you will find yourself presented with 5 chapters, Aphasia, Clamour, Murmur, Voice, Whispers. These chapters, drawn from the core text, became cues inviting speculation in which to travel rhizomatic paths of past and present; offering a polyphony of possibilities as unspoken narratives are intuitively drawn upon.

Grounding their approach has also been an acknowledging of the Arabic word for touch, “Jass” pronounced jass and written ﺟَﺲّ. alongside the translation of “jam” from the Arabic as gatherings. Together Hannan Jones and Shamica Ruddock gather. Responding through improvisatory means they become agents of futures and histories; exploring, improvising, and meditating on their existences as subjects of diasporas with colonial histories, albeit diverging.

Eduoard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation has also nourished this venture. Within Poetics of Relation there is a recognition of forms of communication as intuitive and opaque. This ‘opaque’-ness being spotlighted, is an attempt to account for differences that are inarticulable yet are implicitly understood. Although often concealed, these differences remain present and space is made for them to co-exist, singularly, in relation, in reciprocation, and as a greater whole. And so here we arrive at this current moment. In a cacophonic amalgamation, the space of jass-improvisation-noise provides a home in which much of this thinking folds and unfolds in on itself.

Selected Reading List

Selected Listening List

Acknowledgements