About
An audio-visual investigation into community-led housing across the UK - cohousing, CLTs, cooperative living, retrofit and repair.
This Was Tomorrow: Is This the Future We Were Dreaming Of? is a long-term audio-visual investigation 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 title holds the distance between what was promised and what is lived, and the work tries to make that distance visible - not as failure, but as the actual terrain of collective life.
Who I am
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. He is 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.
How this evolved
The investigation began in 2022, documenting endangered council estates in London and the utopian ideals embedded in their material form. A residency at ESAD IDEA in Porto shifted the focus: rather than documenting loss, the work now examines how places actually function - across different models of collective ownership, adaptation, repair and resilience.
The work is made slowly and on site. It doesn’t take people as its primary subject, focusing instead on places, interiors, objects, traces of use and spatial relationships. Photographs and sound are kept separate - images don’t illustrate voices, and voices don’t explain images - to leave room for interpretation rather than produce explanatory case studies. All recording is optional, and every image and recording is used only with explicit consent.
Supporters & advisors
Supported by Arts Council England through the Developing Your Creative Practice (DYCP) scheme. This phase extends across three geographic strands: London, Cornwall, and the North and West of England.
Developed alongside Open City (Simon Vickery, Open House Festival Programme Manager); Thaddeus Zupancic, writer and photographer documenting London’s modernist council housing; and Judith Martin, architectural historian and conservationist, co-author of the original This Was Tomorrow publication.
Exhibition & publication
The work will be exhibited in 2026-27, including during the Open House Festival. A small photo book is also possible. Communities photographed will be credited and involved in how the work is presented.
Earlier work
- This Was Tomorrow - complete project archive
- Published editions - RIBA Bookshop
- Exhibitions & public presentations