About the Project

In 1626, Francis Bacon imagined a utopian society deliberately concealed within the ordinary world. Four hundred years later, Towards Nowhere applies this vision to the present, treating the overlooked margins of St Albans; disused office buildings, motorway intersections, electricity pylons beside filled quarries, as archaeological sites of forgotten experiments in living.

Shot on 16mm film using in-camera effects and multiple exposures, the work presents itself as a speculative documentary archive: rediscovered footage describing communities that once existed in these liminal spaces. A solitary traveller moves through environments where monolithic structures rise from concrete wastelands, geometric forms emerge among retail parks, and tropical fauna flourishes in abandoned car parks. Masked figures in ritual outfits appear as remnants of lost societies, each with their own approach to collective life.

Working with sound artist Alex Hyland, field recordings conjure the imagined soundscapes of each utopia—their unique aural cultures. A voiceover adapts Bacon's New Atlantis, describing these spaces as if documenting rediscovered civilisations, moving between documentary observation and speculative fiction without resolving whether the material records reality or imagination.

The grain and presence of 16mm celluloid reinforce this ambiguity. What remains when a community vanishes? What traces might we find? And standing among these overlooked places today, we're asked: how do we want to live together now?