John Akomfrah in "London" - Season 10 - "Art in the Twenty-First Century" | Art21

♪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.