Inland Art Festival: The Future Project

Inland is an Art Festival based in Redruth Cornwall and was founded by Cat Bagg, Rosie Allen and Alice Mahoney in 2014. The second iteration in 2016 was titled The Future Project. The Future Project worked as a platform for alternative, possible and impossible, weird and wonderful futures. Working with local residents, artists, academics and musicians, the festival used architecture, environment, social and cultural references to create a 3 day alternative future around Redruth. Redruth once held the title of ‘richest square mile in the world’, the monetary wealth has all but gone but it’s still one of the richest towns we know. There is a strong community living with an epic and visible history, surrounded by a striking rural, post-industrial landscape. During the festival this heritage created the foundation for futuristic expeditions into other worlds, alternate realities and outer space through new commissions, an international open call, curated exhibitions, events and interventions. The future is both a distant prospect and an immediate reality, simultaneously part of the continuum of everyday events and a place where the most impossible, unattainable and fantastical dreams can exist. The works that formed The Future Project, dealt with both the possible and the impossible, the desirable and the disastrous; from conversations about childhood, horticulture and growing to space travel, apocalypse and portals to other worlds.