Opening soon, David Blandy’s new film Commons; co-commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella and The Amelia Scott as part of the programme for The Open Road.

Commons draws on the museum’s collections of objects and specimens. This expansive new work combines archive film with three dimensional scans and newly captured footage of ancient rocks and woodland: common land preserved for all.

This collage of samples reveals a series of stories told by multiple voices; like the Pilgrims of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the non-human subjects and objects tell each other chronicles of their experience, over years or millennia, deliberately decentring human existence. Inspired by the natural world and notions of resistance, characters are brought together on a pilgrimage across deep time, each speaking from their own subjectivity.

The work weaves together Amelia Scott’s activism, local filmmaker Frank P. Barnitt’s 1930s nature observations, a 135-million-year-old fossilised bone, a fox, a crow, a kingfisher, and the dislocated hyper-connectivity of a lost phone, as the object itself speaks about the materials from which it is made. Chaucer’s tale of pilgrimage is reimagined as a matrix of interwoven stories, echoing Donna Haraway’s call for the “modest possibilities of partial recuperation and getting on together.”

Commons is an elegy to nature and the spirit of resistance. Every object holds a life, a story. Blandy summons each object’s subjectivity, drawing on Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology and the fictive anthropology of Ursula Le Guin. Harman’s philosophy rejects anthropocentrism, proposing that all things, from shadows to clouds to the internet, are objects in relation, with no fixed hierarchy.

Focusing on tales of resistance and hope, Commons redefines the museum experience, animating each object by exploring its inner life. The work is a multifaceted examination of history, the collective and the individual, of what it means to share space and share knowledge, and the transience of life in the face of deep time.

Exhibition open from 26 September – 11 January 2025

Venue:
The Amelia Scott, Mount Pleasant Road, Tunbridge Wells, Kent, TN1 1AW

Monday – Friday: 9:00 AM – 6:00 PM / Saturday: 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM / Sunday: 10:00 AM – 4:00 PM

Commons was commissioned for The Open Road by The Amelia Scott, Tunbridge Wells, as part of the Kent and Medway Museum Partnership National Portfolio Organisation, and Film and Video Umbrella. Supported by Arts Council England & Screen Archive South East.