Utopia Portals 2022

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.