About
A photographic investigation by Enrico Policardo into community-led housing across the UK.
This Was Tomorrow: Is This the Future We Were Dreaming Of? is a long-term audio-visual investigation by artist and photographer Enrico Policardo into community-led housing across the UK - cohousing, Community Land Trusts, cooperative living, retrofit and repair.
It looks at places that are functioning in the present, without framing them as models or solutions. The question throughout is not does this work but something closer to what futures are still imaginable from where we are now.
The work began in 2022, with the fundamental input of architectural historian Judith Martin, documenting endangered council estates in London and the utopian ideals held in their concrete. A residency at ESAD IDEA in Porto, made possible by David Marques (Devity Studio), shifted the focus from documenting past utopias to watching the present, and asking why we seem to have lost the postwar momentum that once drove us to build, to house, to look at the future with pragmatism, hope and most importantly for the people.
This phase turns to what people are doing now, from the bottom up - not waiting for the institutions once meant to enable and protect them, but acting for themselves. The aim was never to document these places from the outside - though some of that is inevitable - but to distil, in images and voices, what moved such different people into action, and to amplify their energy and their dreams for everyone who needs to see and hear that a different version of the world is still possible, and already happening.
How the work is made
The work doesn’t take people as its primary subject. It looks instead at places, interiors, objects, traces of use. Image and sound are kept apart, to leave room for interpretation rather than produce explanatory case studies.
People are everywhere in this work, just not in the frame.
Supporters
This work has been made possible by Arts Council England through the Developing Your Creative Practice (DYCP) scheme, and supported by Simon Vickery (Open House Festival Programme Manager), writer and photographer Thaddeus Zupančič, and architectural historian Judith Martin, co-author of the original This Was Tomorrow publication.
This Was Tomorrow grew out of an earlier iteration and two editions of a book of the same title.
About the author
Enrico Policardo (b. 1982, Gorizia, Italy) is a photographer and artist based in London. His work examines how systems of power organise everyday life - housing and who gets to shape it, waste and what a consumer economy throws away, and the contested ground of borders. Creative Director of ReThinkable Festival on the Italy-Slovenia border (Nova Gorica / Gorizia, European Capital of Culture 2024-2026) and an Affiliate Research Fellow at the University of Nova Gorica.
More work at enricopolicardo.com.