Utopia Portals

Directed by Jessica Ashman

Utopia Portals explores utopian concepts of belonging and ‘unbelonging’. Inspired by the Ashman’s first trip to her ancestral homeland of Jamaica, Utopia Portals uses a mix of animated loops, mobile phone footage and soundscapes recorded during her time on the island to create a series of short filmic ‘glitches’ of reality that reveal various forms of surreal hidden worlds. The piece is inspired by the idea of ‘heterotopia’: a concept put forward by the French philosopher Michel Foucault to describe certain cultural spaces that are somehow ‘other’: contradictory or transforming in nature. Utopia Portals delves into the dreams, desires, nightmares and reality of a “homecoming” to a home you are not connected to.