Public Project
Hythloday
Copyright Norberto Fernandez Soriano 2024
Updated Jun 2020
Topics Activism, Art, Arts, Belief, Capitalism, Climate Change, Community, Conceptual, Documentary, Environment, Essays, Fight, Film, Fine Art, Photography, Resistance


Hythloday is a body of work that draws from one community’s fight against fracking, and presents their experience and beliefs through a visual interpretation of what is positioned between fact and fiction.
In the United Kingdom, the trial site for hydraulic fracture-fracking for shale gas – and its potential for national rollout and future commercial exploitation - is located in the countryside between the cities of Preston and Blackpool. A mile down the road from this site, a group of activists - known to the local community as ‘The Protectors’ - set up camp, where they lived and fought to stop this fracking trial.
In what might be described as a “photographic novella”, Hythloday transforms this physical place into an imagined post-fracking scenario, in which the activities, causes, fears, effects and thoughts situated in this place constitute a potential future landscape. Hythloday draws its titled from the name of the sailor in Thomas Moore’s Utopia, which is used as a means to explore and understand the place itself, as well as ‘The Protectors’ fight.
Hythloday combines the characters and elements on the ground with the mood to create a journey through an unknown and strange place that reveals the tension between those protrayed and the land they inhabit. 
 
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