Road for the Future

Road For The Future is a year long collaborative art project initiated by Anna Best around a historic Common and a decommissioned railway, now proposed as a Sustrans Trailway (for bicycles, horses, walkers, wheelchairs, buggies). This will provide access to what some locals call the deep dark heart of Dorset. Artists, architects, educators and conservationists are working concurrently in exploring and articulating our ideas about the countryside, contributing to the debate about its future development and sustainability.

30/04/2012

Adam Chodzko is making two works which transform Powerstock’s locality into a focus for global fantasies. In the first he has taken a series of short videos taken from the imagined viewpoint of a human or animal lying in wait or seeking refuge. Each video is uploaded onto Piratebay with the description that these are copyright-free videos, recorded on Powerstock Common, available to anyone who wants to use them as cutaways within other films. Thus over time the Common metaphorically lifts above its current location to spread globally as clods of earth and vegetation floating through digital and real space, able to freely enter other narratives.
The second work is a performance evoking another possible future; the vision of an overenthusiastic developer imagining a new branch of his bank opening in the incongruous setting at the centre of the Common. The bank is ‘created’ amongst the trees, simply and pragmatically, in order to indicate a few seconds of corporate video where the audience momentarily become the bank’s architecture, staff and protestors.