David Blandy's 2025 FVU-commissioned film Commons screens at Braziers International Film Festival, Oxfordshire as part of the programme Unfolding Archives on Friday 28 August at 7pm.

Commons draws on the collections of objects and specimens at The Amelia Scott, Tunbridge Wells and The Beaney, Canterbury. This expansive 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 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 brings together Amelia Scott’s activism; local film-maker Frank P. Barnitt’s mid 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 talks of tracing the journeys of the materials that it is made from. Chaucer’s tale of coming together on a pilgrimage is reimagined as a matrix of stories looking towards, as Donna Haraway says, the “modest possibilities of partial recuperation and getting on together”.

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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.