The River Between is an exhibition by London-based artist Shamica Ruddock (b. 1992, London) premiering their new 16mm moving image work, Knock Down Pork Knocker.
Working across sound and moving image, Ruddock approaches fiction as a site for knowledge production. Interested in the dynamics of displacement, transferral, capture and legibility through practice, Ruddock considers how these processes inform narrative. The artist is particularly interested in what becomes a substitute, adequate or otherwise, in lieu of absence.
Knock Down Pork Knocker is a magical realist story of enchantment and ‘jumbie’ encounters that blends fiction with Guyanese mining histories, puppetry and Caribbean oral storytelling traditions. The film explores the intersection of African-Caribbean folklore with the lasting spiritual and material legacies of resource extraction following British colonial rule in Guyana.
The film presents an oral account of a proverb about Kiso, a Guyanese ‘Pork Knocker,’ an independent miner working precariously in the country’s interior. Returning alone to the Kamarang river in search of gold, his flight leads him to encounter the Jumbie, the trickster spirit of Caribbean folklore. Kiso’s story is narrated by the Griot, the traditional custodian of collective memory from West African cultural practices. Kiso and the Jumbie’s encounters are portrayed through puppetry, whilst the Griot is a live-action narrator, performed by Coreen Carberry, creating rich layers of storytelling. Alongside the film, Ruddock presents a series of materials used in the production, including Kaiso and Massa handmade puppets, whittled and stained by the artist.
Knock Down Pork Knocker blends fiction with careful research into Guyanese mining histories, creating a story within a highly textured, sensuous world, raising questions of labour, extraction and environmental destruction.
