Commons is an expansive and thought-provoking new film by acclaimed artist David Blandy, presented for the first time at The Amelia Scott in Tunbridge Wells. The work has been co-commissioned by The Amelia Scott and Film and Video Umbrella as part of the programme for The Open Road. Blending archive, local history, nature, and storytelling, Commons invites audiences on a journey through the ancient woodlands and shared spaces of Tunbridge Wells Commons.
Drawing on the collections of objects and specimens at The Amelia Scott, Tunbridge Wells, and The Beaney, Canterbury, Commons combines archive film, 3D scans, and newly captured footage of ancient rocks and woodland – common land preserved for all. This expansive work reveals a series of stories told by multiple voices. Like the pilgrims in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, non-human subjects and objects recount their experiences across years or millennia, deliberately decentring the human perspective. Inspired by the natural world and ideas of resistance, these characters embark on a pilgrimage through 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.
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 using public funding by Arts Council England.
The Open Road is a series of artists moving image works, co-commissioned by a partnership of visual arts organisations; Film and Video Umbrella, The Amelia Scott, Cement Fields, FLAMIN, Forma, and Three Rivers.
Commons A film by David Blandy 26th September 2025 – Sunday 11th January 2026
The Amelia Scott, Tunbridge Wells
