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.
The Open Road reimagines the age-old tale of a journey taken, weaving together new stories by three contemporary artists. The works are loosely inspired by The Canterbury Tales, drawing from a disparate cast of characters to recount competing stories in a patchwork of styles. David Blandy, Amaal Said and Sam Williams each draw on storytelling traditions to give fresh perspectives on their journeys, on foot, by sea and through time. The newly commissioned works meander through reflections on migration and belonging, untold histories and non-human connections. A smashed mobile phone decries its extraction, removed, returned and dug out from the earth. A daughter recounts a meandering walk with her mother, connecting with the earth underfoot and a land far away. A manifestation of an eel acts as a vessel for both human and non-human experiences in the Kent wetlands.
The Open Road begins in September 2025 with Commons by David Blandy at The Amelia Scott in Tunbridge Wells, continuing with Amaal Said’s Open Country at Red House in October 2025, and then on to The Eel’s Tale by Sam Williams with screenings in North Kent in October 2025 and as a part of Canterbury Festival in November 2025. The works will be screened together at FormaHQ on the evening of Thursday, 13th November 2025. More screenings and events will take place between September and December 2025 and early 2026, hosting the works throughout Bexley and FormaHQ, London.
Commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella, The Amelia Scott, Cement Fields, FLAMIN, Forma, and Three Rivers. Supported using public funding by the Arts Council England.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Commons / About David Blandy
David Blandy’s film 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”.
David Blandy is an artist examining global structures of control and networks of resistance, in areas that range from ecology, history and science to arenas of play. He makes videos, games, sound and ephemera, deconstructing forms to put them back together again. He searches for meaning in cultural life, an expanded form for auto-anthropology, sifting through multiple forms of archive, from historic texts to academic archives, archaeology and ecological theory, twitch streams and film archives; Blandy weaves lyrical works that explore the complexities of the contemporary subject. He builds complex stories that sketch out a future of interdependence, through visual poetry and immersive play.
He has exhibited & performed at venues nationally and worldwide, with solo shows at John Hansard Gallery, Southampton; Towner Gallery, Eastbourne; Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea; The Baltic, Gateshead; Turner Contemporary, Margate; Spike Island, Bristol; The Exchange, Newlyn; Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Germany. Blandy has also exhibited in museums and screenings internationally including at CPH:DOX, Copenhagen International Documentary Festival 2024; Serpentine Gallery, London; LA Film Forum, Los Angeles; Art Tower Mito, Tokyo; Kiasma Contemporary Art Museum, Helsinki; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Tate Modern, London; MoMA PS1, New York & 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan. He was nominated for the Film London Jarman award with Larry Achiampong in 2018.
David Blandy is represented by Seventeen Gallery, London. His films are distributed by LUX, London
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.
Open Country / About Amaal Said
A Somali mother and daughter set out from their London home along the Old Kent Road, tracing the Pilgrims' Way into Bexley, North Kent, and beyond. The daughter plans to record an audio cassette diary for her grandmother, who is back home in Somalia and in ill health. Hoping to ease her mother’s worries and lift her spirits, she uses the journey as a way to bring joy and to help her focus on the road ahead. Inspired by a longing to connect with family abroad, the film explores the tension between being present in the here and now and yearning for another place. A number of sequences were filmed at the Red House, a National Trust property in Bexley originally built for the artist William Morris, in addition to locations in Canterbury and the Kent coast.
Amaal Said is a London-based multidisciplinary artist whose work encompasses visual storytelling and community engagement. Born in Denmark to Somali parents, her photography has been featured in Vogue, The Guardian, and The New Yorker. She has exhibited internationally and received the Southwark Council’s I Create grant for her film Notes on Getting Home in 2022. As a Picture Researcher at Hyphen, she curates visuals to amplify Muslim narratives. Amaal holds an MA in Art & Politics from Goldsmiths and a BA in Politics from SOAS.
Commissioned for The Open Road by Film and Video Umbrella, Forma and Three Rivers. Supported using public funding by Arts Council England.
The Eel’s Tale / About Sam Williams
Drawing upon the structure and spirit of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, Sam Williams's The Eel's Tale explores themes of boundaries, transgression and movement through human and non-human journeys through the wetland landscapes of Kent. Through intertwined vignettes, the film reconsiders the borders that separate us from each other, the land, and our multispecies kin, and asks: “Are we free to move?"
Sam Williams is an artist with a practice that intertwines moving-image, collage, choreography, sound and writing. His ongoing research focuses on multispecies entanglements, ecological systems, bodies-as-worlds and folk mythologies and how they propose possibilities for present and future ways of non-human-centric living. Sam is based in London where he is a resident at Somerset House Studios. He has presented work at institutions including Chisenhale Gallery, Arnolfini, Siobhan Davies Dance, Somerset House, Tate Britain, Studio Voltaire and South Kiosk (UK), She Will (Norway); Röda Sten Konsthall (SE); Kino Arsenal, Akademie der Kunst, Tanzhalle Wisenberg and B3 Biennale (Germany).
Commissioned for The Open Road by Cement Fields and FLAMIN (Film London Artists’ Moving Image Network). Supported using public funding by Arts Council England. Presented in Canterbury as part of Canterbury Festival 2025.