ASSUNTA RUOCCO

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Our Days of Gold

Our Days of Gold (2017-ongoing) is a work that explores grief, memory, and the suspended temporality of social media as a site of mourning and speculative reanimation. The project began in 2017 as a durational, performative archive on Instagram (@ourdaysofgold_film), where one image is shared daily from a collection of photographs and video made by the artist with her siblings in the early 2000s. Through this rhythm of posting, the work invites anonymous co-authorship from an online audience and blurs the boundaries between an analogue archive and its digital staging, between photography and moving image.

In 2024, an exhibition at TG Gallery in Nottingham revisited the archive through video and installation, mapping a long-lost family home in Sorrento, Italy onto the former caretaker’s flat that now houses the gallery within Primary.
Our Days of Gold also expanded into collaboration with The Cool Company, an over-55s improvisational dance group led by Deane McQueen at Nottingham Contemporary. Together, they animated the archive through projections, movement, and spatial drawing.

Our Days of Gold and Cool Company, Nottingham Contemporary

Assunta Ruocco and choreographer and Cool Company artistic director Deane McQueen are developing an interdisciplinary collaboration rooted in movement, memory, and photographic archives. Drawing on Ruocco’s Our Days of Gold—a collection of analogue family photographs shared since 2017 via Instagram—the project explores the memory palace as a choreographic tool.

Building on workshops with performers over 55 at Nottingham Contemporary in January 2025, McQueen and Ruocco are investigating how curated photographs act as spatial and emotional prompts, anchoring memory within embodied improvisation. The project brings together architecture, sound, and dance to create participatory environments where non-trained bodies contribute meaningfully to collective, evolving choreographic structures. At its core, the collaboration treats memory as a spatial, sensory, and democratic process.

Our Days of Gold (Video) TG Gallery, Nottingham, 2024

The exhibition Our Days of Gold (Video) at TG Gallery in Nottingham (2024) revisited a large archive of photographs and video made by Assunta Ruocco in collaboration with her siblings, family and friends in the early 2000s. The work attempted to map a long lost family home in Sorrento onto the former caretaker’s flat that now houses TG gallery in Nottingham. See the exhibition documentation and text.

Mirrors, Windows, Portals, Project Space Plus, University of Lincoln, 2024
photos by Assunta Ruocco and Alex Wright

This group exhibition co-curated by Assunta Ruocco and Alison Lloyd, explores embodied approaches to the photographic archive. Staged at Project Space Plus in Lincoln in March 2024, the exhibition brought together works by artists whose practices re-animate personal and collective archives through collaboration, performance, and speculative image-making. The project began as a dialogue between Ruocco and Lloyd, who had both returned to early photographic works: Ruocco’s from the early 2000s and Lloyd’s from the late 1970s, using social media platforms to give them new life. Their conversations raised questions about how images from the past might help configure identities in the present and future.

Artists include Ellen Angus, Giulia Damiani + Le Nemesiache, Janhavi Sharma, Sofia Yala, and the collaborative project Our Days of Gold (Ruocco with Daniel T. Wheeler). The exhibition featured 35mm slide projection, video, overhead projection, digital print, and chromogenic prints, presented alongside archival material and wall texts.

Rejecting the binary model of photography as either mirror or window (as posited by John Szarkowski in his 1978 MoMA exhibition), Mirrors, Windows, Portals embraced reflective surfaces, mirrors, bodies of water, and digital screens, as thresholds for transformation. Across the works, the archive emerges as a site of reconfiguration and ritual, a space for grief, play, and speculative futures. Supported by Derby Quad the exhibition marked a tribute to Lloyd’s feminist vision while extending it through new contributions and curatorial collaboration.

Our Days of Gold, Italian Cultural Institute, Hamburg, 2019.

Collaborative exhibition that reflects on authorship, technological mediation, and the dynamics between artists, technicians, and tools. Developed with photographer and master printer Daniel T. Wheeler, the project draws from Assunta Ruocco’s analogue photographic archive (2002–2007), which she has been sharing via Instagram as @ourdaysofgold_film. Wheeler selected and hand-printed images from the archive, offering his own interpretation of family life, gender identity, and the rituals of adolescence and middle age. The exhibition examines how domestic constraints, evolving technologies, and collaborative processes shape the emergence and reactivation of photographic work, bridging the digital and analogue, the personal and the procedural.

Our Days of Gold Academic Writing

Ruocco, A. (2024) ‘Our Days of Gold. Love, Death, Instagram, and the Photographic Archive’. In Jessica Hemmings and Jyoti Mistry (eds.) Powers of Love, PARSE Journal 17

Ruocco, A. (forthcoming) ‘Our Days of Gold. A Performative Approach to Mourning and the Re-Animation of a Photographic Archive on Social Media’, in O’Connor, M. and D. Reflund, (eds.) ‘All Things Re-Imagined’ anthology to be published within the Routledge book series ‘Death, Dying and Bereavement’ edited by Robert Neimeyer and Darcy Harris

Our Days of Gold Artist Books

Assunta Ruocco and Michel Assenmaker, Suite 11, 2025