THE WORLD AFTER: VISIONS OF THE DEEP PAST

Visions of the Deep Past
David Blandy,
Commissioned for Brent 2020: London Borough of Culture, with support from Arts Council England

For Visions of the Deep Past, David Blandy worked with young people from Capital City Academy and Roundwood Youth Centre to reimagine Harlesden 8000 years from now.

This future is set in the high fantasy world of The World After, a role-play game setting that Blandy built over several years. It imagines a lush environment, a place where humans have left the surface for millennia, and a new world has evolved, erasing much of humanity’s legacy.

For Visions of the Deep Past, David Blandy worked with young people from Brent (a borough of North London, UK) to reimagine their local area of Harlesden 8000 years from now. Through discussion, writing and drawing this possible society and its history were created with young people and translated into visuals by the artist. They imagined what would happen after the sea has risen high enough that a shore forms at Kensal Green (currently inland in London) and all trace of humanity is lost to the great forests.

This future is set in the high fantasy world of The World After, a role-play game setting that Blandy built over several years. It imagines a lush environment, a place where humans have left the surface for millennia, and a new world has evolved, erasing much of humanity’s legacy.

Visions of the Deep Past is an expansion of the tabletop roleplaying game Blandy co-created for an exhibition, The World After at Focal Point Gallery, UK. The World After was inspired by a wildlife reserve that had been the site for an oil refinery, which was then abandoned and left to nature, now the home of rare arachnids and wild orchids. It’s a tale of rebirth, and inspired by the works of sci-fi authors like Ursula Le Guin, Octavia Butler and Philip K. Dick – Blandy imagined a future world, millennia after our present climate cataclysm, when humanity had been hiding underground all that time, waiting for the Earth to recover. And now their descendants, evolved into post-human forms, were seeing the mythical surface world, The Intersection, for the first time.

Working in Brent (a borough of North London, UK) was a homecoming for the artist who grew up there. The story of future changes and the present climate cataclysm felt visceral, reflecting on the reality of sea-level change, hearing the internal lives of all these young people. The artist writes "It’s easy to feel bleak about the future, but then you talk to this huge range of young people and think, “we’re going to be ok”. In some ways the project is an expression of a collective unconscious of the area, with local concerns bleeding through the all-pervading shift of environmental collapse and renewal.”

Through discussion, writing and drawing this possible society and its history were created with young people and translated into visuals by illustrator Wumi Olaosebikan alongside designs by the group participants. Large-scale images of this post-human world, presented in bold vinyl, filled Harlesden Library, along with a timeline flowing throughout the building telling a future history of Brent.

Brent was The Mayor’s London Borough of Culture for 2020. Their programme explored the stories, art and emotions that hold life in Brent together, uncovering and celebrating its untold tales and unheard voices.

Brent 2020

Art Review Interview with David Blandy
Elephant Interview - Ravi Ghosh