David Blandy, for the Brent Biennial, imagines Harlesden 8,000 years in the future.
Working in performance and moving image, David Blandy’s artworks and projects have for two decades explored the cultural forces that inform identity and kinship, ranging computer games and manga to hip hop and soul music. Though his influences are popular, the subject matter of his work is serious, taking in subjects like gender, race and the environment.
ArtReview: Can you tell us about your project for the biennial?
David Blandy: World After: Visions of the Deep Past is an expansion of a fantasy future world that I’ve been developing for the past two years, as tabletop role play game, film and fiction, site-specific for Harlesden Library. With young people from the local Roundwood Youth Centre and Capital City Academy we imagined what Harlesden would be like in 8000 years, after the sea has risen high enough that there is a shore at Kensal Green and all trace of humanity is lost to the great forests. We also imagined a series of societies that had evolved in local Havens, huge silos deep underground, and came up with four distinct Harlesden post-human evolutions. There are the avian Avari, who have a strict hierarchical society where rank is defined by plumage; the Torads, an amphibian feudal society in constant revolt; the Clawsa, an industrial matriarchal democracy where the ursine, feline and canine factions vie for supremacy; and the Underealms, a brutal anarchic society that revolves around scavenged technological body enhancement.
Harlesden Library has become a setting for this imagining, with coloured vinyl being used to cover the walls of the library in vines and to show dioramas from this world. Alongside that are cut-out standup figures, as you’d find in a cinema or gaming shop, of several of the characters the young people have created to populate their visions of the future, some drawn by them, some interpreted by illustrator Wumi Olaosebikan. There is also a 3D animated intro sequence for an imagined videogame of the world described, shown on a screen that normally displays council information, and a timeline of Harlesden’s last 1000 years and next 8000 years, taking us up to the time of the fiction. The whole project is contained in a publication, a Riso-printed 36-page companion to the original hard-back rulebook, a supplement that expands the fictional world. I really wanted to use Riso as it’s the only sustainable form of printing, using soy inks and banana paper stencils.
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Image: Visions of the Deep Past, David Blandy, 2020, Photo credit: Thierry Bal