Fixing Luka

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.

We follow Cherelle and Minomi’s 25-year relationship, plagued with micro-aggressions and realisations.

Dawta has a power she is not aware of that propels her through time and space to a utopian planet.

“I don’t want to feel like it’s only me. I know it’s not only me, because there are others out there…” ‘I Don’t Protest, I Just Dance In My Shadow’ is a short visual essay film by artist animator, Jessica Ashman, about navigating the visual art and animation world as a black face in a white space. Using animation and recorded interviews of eight other women of colour artists, ‘I Don’t Protest, I Just Dance In My Shadow’ is an abstract confessional from the director herself: a visualisation of the joy, frustration, wishes and dreams of what it feels like to be a black women and a woman of colour artist, creating and existing.