Sojourn Project Space
Sojourn Project Space occupies Assunta Ruocco’s small artist studio at Backlit, a Nottingham arts organization. It also occupies the scraps of time that Ruocco can save from her job, practice and family. When Ruocco first started renting the studio, artist Chiara Dellerba visited her, and she particularly loved the sliding door,including its internal construction. Dellerba opened her friend’s eyes to the studio’s potential and flexibility as a space for co-production and display and they started imagining it as a place of sojourn for themselves and others.
The first artist invited to Sojourn, Zak Jones, did not actually spend much time at the space. He came from London at Ruocco’s invitation to run a banner making workshop at Lincoln Labour Club for the Lincoln UCU in March 2023. Jones and Ruocco spent a few hours with a group of staff and students planning and pinning a large banner, which was made from secondhand materials and acquired the beautiful colours of the Transgender Pride flag. Ruocco spent many hours sewing the pinned banner together at home so that she could finish it and donate it to Lincoln UCU.
Ellen Angus brought a collapsible plastic tube containing her paintings, oil on canvas copies of Turner’s ‘The Fighting Temeraire’ to the studio. Angus and Ruocco talked and spent time imagining possible ways of installing them, that could connect to nautical materials and romantic attachments. But Angus was also curious about Ruocco’s silk scarf making, as she thought silk scarves make good museum souvenirs. They ended up asking another artist to take a photograph of one of the paintings, nailed onto the mdf partition of Sojourn with huge nails. Ruocco got the photograph digitally printed on silk twill and gave it a hand sewn rolled hem. Angus nailed the silk scarf next to the painting. They hosted an unauthorized tea and biscuits afternoon with friends.
Sumiko Eadon taught Ruocco about silence in her sojourn at the studio. Although there was conversation also. Eadon asked her friend to engage in the slow, difficult (for Ruocco) process of cutting tiny slices off a beautiful roll of Japanese paper. It was an enormous task, and they only managed a small section in several sittings. But Ruocco tried to document their efforts with her phone. They had several afternoon sessions in July and August 2023, when the weather was mild and the studio pleasant and light. Eadon also wanted them to work on her artist statement and display strategies together.
Ruocco can’t remember if it was Alison Lloyd that proposed she apply her own methodology to her friend’s photography archive. Usually, Ruocco asks others to choose images from her archive, but this time, she sat with Lloyd while the artist showed her a box of negatives, she had kept for more than 40 years. Lloyd let Ruocco pick a strip that she was particularly interested in, because you could see the interior of her home and a series of photographic prints from a wedding were on the table. Ruocco scanned the negatives, printed them large at work andexhibited them in the space during the November 2023 Backlit Open Studios.
Inside Sojourn, Ruocco asks the question: what can I do for you? You, being another artist whose practice she is interested in, and a person she would like to spend time with and learn more about. How can she put her skills and resources at the service of their work? How can she activate her practice’s methodologies to invest theirs with something new which might please them both? Ruocco uses skills developed in long years working behind the scenes in the art world, and as an artist assistant, in subordinate positions where minimizing one’s contribution is a valuable skill, and in a relationship where facilitating her partner’s art practice was the foundation of co-dependency. The plasticity of her methodology was forged by those experiences, and she is looking for new ways to employ it.