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

Judith Dean has been working with ideas of territory and claiming, conflating the epic and the everyday, negotiating the omnipresence of cliché.

Faced with working remotely in relation to the Common, Dean resorted to trying to be there when she wasn’t, which immediately meant the Common didn’t have to be what or where it is, and that other places, where neither of them were or ever could be, could intrude.

The farce begins.

The Common becomes Rome, both as a foundation of British history and as a symbol of colonization, with a little persuasion and sometimes with the aid of props. This, in turn, is invaded by footage and sound from a variety of sources, that can both be related and unrelated to the Common and Rome; that offer simultaneously superficial and substantial relationships to both.

The work, a video, will be returned to Powerstock Common, where it will be shown on the tumulus, its oldest marked historical site. A performance / walk will take material from the video back into the unmediated world, a kind of excavation and / or reenactment of something that hasn’t happened yet, to see what happens next.