♪energetic strings♪
When I was younger, the dream was to go and study art history and I just wanted to be
an art historian. Not even an artist, just an art historian, and I don't know where that came from.
I think the first time I came here,
I would have been 14 and came back every month until I left West London to go to university.
I started with the gentler one's, the Constables. And Constable always feels like that for me,
it feels like the beginning of one's initiation to painting.
It's a sort of fateful rendition of English countryside. I get that sort
of familiarity with certain features of the English landscape. I get all of that.
Turner's my guy because there there's an act of will and imagination, which is at the forefront
with what I call his cinematic eye. It's a painting, but it feels like you're
in the disaster.
Everything I love about Turner from the beginning is right there.
When you're a kid, you're made by paintings because they teach you to be a human being.
They didn't teach me to be a Black person, but they taught me to be a human being.
Slowly, it dawned on me, that it's a sort of temple of whiteness, everywhere you look you can
see it. And that whiteness is offered to you by the paintings as a sort of vision of excellence.
It's almost like a psychoanalytic moment of becoming. The very thing that you love may well
be also the thing that's keeping you in a state of discomfort about your place in the culture.
And so, you have to find another way of coming at
the thing you love, by embellishing it with other histories and other stories and other narratives.
I became interested in making multi screen films because it seemed a
way of bringing disparate interests together.
In a project in which you've shot material yourself, having archival material immediately
says, multiplicity or voices at work, rather than a voice.
I'm more choreographer than creator.
[John] I always love this stuff.
— Yeah.
[John] Somehow you can just see, I don't know,
but weirdly you can see that that's 4K.
[Qasim] Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's like more detail in the lines.
[John] Yeah, it's just more detail, it's just more light.
[Qasim] Yeah.
[John] Um, oh look at that.
Whole range, but you can see, what's going on
[Qasim] Amazing, yeah.
[Laughs]
[John] Oh, oh yeah. Yeah, go back.
If you live as I did in London, growing up as a person of color, one of the missions
was to understand who you were and then by implication, make sense of that to everybody else.
That this was a feeling I shared with others was really important
for how Black Audio Film Collective came about.
We came together as a group in the same art college on the south coast of England.
We heard from friends across the country that something was going on
in Handsworth and that we should come and document it.
[Woman] The youths are angry.
Not only the unemployment
That is just in the background.
That just-- everybody feel that. Right?
That's not a major part.
It's the harassment that is going on with the black people in the area...
[John] One of the features of the 70's and 80's was a spate of riots across the country.
The reasons why a young group of Black men and women would take
to the street had something to do with the present, of course. But,
it is also a kind of accumulation of all sorts of other events, which leads to that point.
[Woman] These are for those to whom history has not been friendly.
For those who have known the cruelties of political becoming.
[John] One of the things you needed to do was to remind people that the riots were simply stalked by
all these other history's.
"Handsworth Songs" was an attempt to try and do that.
We wanted to raise the question of Black representation in filmmaking.
By the 90's, we felt like we'd done it.
We continue to be friends and allies even thought we don't work together as a collective anymore.
Literally, a couple of months ago what defined this square was
permanent camps of people who were pro Brexit and people who were very definitely anti Brexit. And
of course it's all gone now. It feels like a done deal, it really does and depressingly so actually.
Increasingly, there's a kind of disenchantment with being in London.
Most of us who are foreign looking got the narrative very early on that apart
from anything else, what Brexit was about was saying, "We don't want you."
And it made you feel momentarily ruthless.
Now that it feels as if it's "Over,"
part of the accepting it is also not to allow yourself to be destabilized by it.
The essence of all experiments, be it in politics or aesthetics or narrative is that, there has to
be a way in which the past, present, and the future can be brought into some sort of whole.
It is impossible to overstate the significance of the sea in
the formation of the African diaspora and Black identity.
"Vertigo Sea" was made up of readings from "Moby Dick."
Accounts of enslaved Africans perishing at sea and certainly, the Vietnamese
boat crisis' of the 70's, people trying to escape from North Vietnam to come to Europe.
It was important that it felt episodic.
When I installed "Vertigo Sea" at Turner Contemporary, we had a Turner,
and the painting we chose was "The Deluge." And it was absolutely, absolutely perfect
for that show because it gave "Vertigo Sea" a kind of godparent.
It felt to me important
that you had different voices to represent the ways in which disasters come at sea.
♪soft ominous synths♪
The shift to making "Purple" was out of the desire to find a way of fusing
autobiography and historical insights together.
If you live as I did, in London in the 60's,
no one ever mentioned the fact that living underneath a power station, which pumped a
million ton of carbon dioxide into the air may have an adverse effect on your life. Never.
Battersea Power Station was working at the time of the Cuban revolution, and continued
to work by the time Nkrumah was overthrown in Ghana in '66. It was poisoning me during
the March on Washington. You know, all of these things were happening at exactly the same time.
There's no causality between the March on Washington and my poisoning as a teenager.
But, the connective tissue is me.
I lived through this, I experienced this.
And so, by implication I am this weird product of these disparate elements.
[Man] In the sky, those gasses are partially converted to
sulfuric and nitric acids.
♪soft piano♪
[John] It's not true that children don't know when seismic political events take place, they do.
Uh, you felt it palpably.
I remember it very clearly that things had changed in Ghana.
I'm of Ghanaian heritage.
My mom was a member of the ruling party that took Ghana to independence in '57.
The military coup in '66 pretty much meant that we had to leave Ghana,
because coups are a bit like death when they come. It wipes out everything.
I was very, very happy to come here. And for a good decade, this literally was paradise for me.
"Four Nocturnes" was my contribution to the Ghana Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
The brief was do something on Ghana freedom.
Global warming is affecting Africans. Everyone on the continent is suffering.
Whenever you're looking at an image of a young person walking across a desert,
it's also worth considering on the screen left and right, that that desert is not history free.
So many young African migrants were drowned, in the thousands at sea five, six years ago.
All of those lives were saying, "Come on man, you could have been one of us."
So if you're not one of us, what are you doing to tell people about who we are?"
Once you've understood that you are a product of things,
you can't shake off realizing that from across your life.
[Dread Scott] Those who wish to die free, rise with me!
[cheering]
Onto New Orleans!
[John] The artist Dread Scott decided that he would organize the 1811
slavery rebellion reenactment as a march, as a way of honoring the event.
I have known Dread for the last 15 years.
Generally friends or allies ask me to do
something, I would if I can. And, I got involved because he asked as an act of solidarity.
If it looks like they're going to go too far that way, just gently bring it across. Okay.
Let's roll on this now, because I can see them in the distance.
It's a huge African diasporic event that could have conceivably changed the
entire history of enslavement across the Americas.
We will now spend probably the next seven months, Lara and I, trying to find a narrative
order to the material that we shot over the two, three days. And then, we'll begin to add
some of this stuff to it.
I'd like it to call on other events to help it make sense in the present.
If you ever see me in the field shooting, there would usually be my long-time collaborator
David Lawson. My partner, Lina, who has also a member of the collective,
and my son Ashitey who is now working with us. And between us, we shepherd each project through.
The sense of belonging isn't some abstract ideal Britishness or Englishness or even a Londonness.
It's very concrete, specific things. You make a space in a corner of it that you're comfortable with,
with a bunch of your mates, and that's your England, that's your Britain, that's your London.