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

Anna Lucas has made a film within which she observes and portrays three men at work, a deer stalker and squirrel trapper and an activist who utilises road kill skins. Who are they, why are we told so little, unanswered questions evoke a palpable atmosphere and take us to a place outside the verbal. In previous work Lucas has explored social networks and group relationships. This new work departs to focus on the solitary activities the men pursue, their relationship with animals and the land. Their aloneness echoes the fact that pre-oil the land was full of people working, and how at the same time the gentry had themselves painted in empty pastoral scenes, which have fed our notions of how the countryside should look. The almost stealthy quality of the men’s activity in Lucas’s film reiterates and questions this state of affairs. The film will be shown off grid using pedal power with Magnificent Revolution.