British-Ghanian artist Larry Achiampong has created a complex and thoughtful piece, partly under the aegis of the Turner Contemporary gallery in Margate. It is a curation of scenes and images that straddles the concepts of the essay movie, the road movie and – that emerging genre – the lockdown movie. Perside Rodrigues portrays a young woman of colour who is making a kind of mythic or hallucinatory journey, a dreamed quest through a British landscape from north to south, in which she often seems like the only person left alive, reflecting on her experience of empire, identity and racism. It is set in a notional future time of pandemic (and filmed during the real pandemic lockdown) and shows this figure mostly alone in an eerily untenanted world, sometimes carrying or wearing a weird gas mask. Achiampong recently told the Guardian that he had in fact made these masks for his own family during lockdown.
