The Election Project - Landscapes of Innocence & Experience- Simon Roberts

Friday 28th October – Sunday 27th November. Monday to Saturday 10am – 8pm; Sunday 11am – 2.30pm.

1 channel video with sound (25 mins)

Commissioned in 2010 as the official Election Artist for the House of Commons, photographer Simon Roberts observes public life through the British landscape.

'During my journey around the country between August 2007 and September 2008 for the making of We English, the bank Northern Rock collapsed and the credit crunch unfolded, events that heralded the beginning in a shift in public consciousness about the impending financial crisis.

Twenty months later, for the making of The Election Project, I returned to many of the places I had visited and this time, the landscapes were alive not with people at leisure, but with canvassing candidates, political slogans, and echoing with warnings of cutbacks and imminent hardship.

Landscapes of Innocence and Experience explores the changes that have affected Britain economically and politically over the last three years. This 3-channel video projection, shot from the passenger window of a motor-home, documents a journey around the country during the official four-week period of campaigning for the 2010 General Election, finishing in Westminster on the morning of 7th May, when no overall political party had formed a government. The film goes in search of incidental spaces and moments across Britain’s urban and rural landscapes set against a soundtrack of ambient noise and radio news bulletins. It explores our new predicament in this era of austerity and the shifting perceptions of the country’s economic and political geography, with its many anxieties; a rediscovery and revaluation of where we find ourselves today.'

Simon Roberts