John Akomfrah in Venice: a long time coming

It’s a November morning and I’m on a long train journey from London to Plymouth. Travelling through mist, through dappled sun, dilapidated towns, regional accents, rural idylls, industrial sites and over the River Exe, where shipwrecks jut from the glassy water like charred skeletons and the vastness, the harshness of the Earth is palpably raw.

Sir John Akomfrah CBE RA, the artist representing Britain at the 60th Venice Biennale, is on the train one hour behind. We are voyaging to see Arcadia at The Box museum in Plymouth, the last film Akomfrah will unveil before he barricades himself in his production studio until April.

The springboard for Arcadia was the 1620 sailing of the Mayflower – the ship that transported a group of English families, known today as the Pilgrims – from Plymouth to the ‘New World’ in 1620. Arcadia was commissioned in 2019 and by early 2020, the research was done. Then the Covid-19 pandemic put the world, and the project, on hold. But these events gave Akomfrah time to reflect on the nature of disease; as an assailant that travels with people and causes devastation, but can’t be seen or controlled by them.

Akomfrah arrives at The Box slightly behind schedule, which has a domino effect on the interview running order. Now the entire press trip, apart from me, is on their way back to London. And still no interview. Plus, there’s something wrong with the film and the only technician who knows how to fix it needed to leave ten minutes ago. I keep being told that this is the one and only chance to speak to Akomfrah ahead of Venice. Pressure: high. Time: dwindling. Tick tock.

Finally, Akomfrah emerges. Time is a construct until you’ve got 15 minutes to interview the biggest artist in Britain right now, in which case it becomes very real. I try to splutter the questions out quickly but my babbling elongates them. He laughs, I laugh – we’re both tired.

“In the last decade, I’ve been interested in devising projects in which unseen guests could be given their due respect,” Akomfrah says in a cadence that suggests every word should be savoured (and with the endearing quality of chuckling between sentences, even when the subject is serious). “Because, inevitably, most standard cinematic pieces are built around human agency and tend to always push out anything non-human.” By “unseen guests,” Akomfrah is referring to the wind that carried the travellers between Europe, Africa and the Americas and the cocktail of diseases that accompanied European colonists and wiped out entire settlements.

The colonisation of peoples is often synonymous with physical violence, but it’s the transfer of invisible cargo that interests Akomfrah. “When you think about it, most of the fundamental building blocks of our civility are things unseen. And certainly, most of the negative features of our lives, whether it’s gender bias or racism, you can’t see, which is why they’re so subject to disputation.”

Akomfrah was born in Accra, Ghana in 1957 to parents who were involved with anti-colonial activism. He moved to west London aged eight when his mother’s life was endangered by the 1966 Ghanaian coup and his father “died in the upheaval.” Growing up in 1970s London, Akomfrah found solace in cinema and visited Tate Britain regularly, where he fell in love with 19th-century painting. But something was missing; people who looked like him. Akomfrah could have been deterred, but instead, the lack of representation became a driving force.

In 1982, after graduating with a degree in sociology from Portsmouth Polytechnic (now the University of Portsmouth), he co-founded the Black Audio Film Collective, dedicated to examining Black British identity through experimental film. The group surfaced in the wake of the 1981 Brixton riots and the wider civil unrest across Britain at the time, subjects that became the focus of their celebrated debut documentary, Handsworth Songs (1986), directed by Akomfrah. In 1998, after producing some of the most challenging cinematic investigations that Britain had ever seen, the BAFC disbanded. The same year, Akomfrah founded Smoking Dogs Films with Lina Gopaul and David Lawson (former members of BAFC) and developed an acclaimed art practice defined by bricolage-style films that explore slavery, migration and conflict (Vertigo Sea, 2015); colonial histories (Auto Da Fé, 2016) ecological disaster (Purple, 2017); racial identity and injustice (Five Murmurations, 2021).

Akomfrah has many mentors. Those he’s known, and those he’s admired from afar: Jamaican sociologist and activist Stuart Hall (whom Akomfrah made a film about in 2013); Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky; Pablo Neruda (whom Akomfrah used to read “all day” when he had aspirations of becoming a poet); Miles Davis; Arvo Pärt; Gaston Bachelard; Virginia Woolf. “The thing with not being completely centred by culture is that you can grow and find figures across a spectrum of disciplines and subjects,” he says.

Having spent much of his formative years dealing with unseen human forces, Akomfrah has increasingly turned to ecological and biological subjects in “places that may not have been necessarily important as battlegrounds, but that were the scene of major epidemics or major storms.” Ultimately, demonstrating that humans are not the only actors in the drama of history.

Arcadia charts the Columbian exchange: the widespread transfer of people, plants, animals, commodities, diseases and ideas between Europe, Afro-Eurasia and the Americas – the ‘New World’ and the ‘Old World’– from the 1400s onwards. Arcadia is a series of evocative vignettes that hop from place to place, time to time: Santo Domingo 1493, Kongo 1629, North Japan 1734, Southern Africa 1755, peppered with quotes from books including Milton’s Paradise Lost: “Beware impetuous winds.” “Each date and each location in Arcadia is a scene of a disaster,” he says.

Unlike many of Akomfrah’s recent films on three screens, Arcadia is composed of five, to represent a compass. It’s 50 minutes of slow, steady pans, wide drone footage of the Earth’s surfaces, nature swallowing man-made monuments and humans mimicking nature. Part of the soundtrack is a 19th-century opera called The African, which tells its own story of colonial conquest. Clocks are everywhere – in the shallows, lining the sand, ticking in your ears. “I’m very interested in trying to signpost the presence of time not simply as a force, but as a presence, as a device in the drama,” he says. “Sometimes the crudest thing to do is also the most interesting. It just struck me that a bunch of very large clocks suggests a sort of labyrinth of temporality.”

In Arcadia, there is darkness and implied catastrophe – smallpox-ridden faces, figures burdened by crucifixes, a beach-turned-junkyard, relics of trade, vacant period clothing hanging from trees, a battered coastline lined with bones, blobs of acid-yellow slime-mould smothering a rock – landscapes scarred by history. But there is also beauty in abundance, which is the danger of it all: epic seas, vast skies and beaches, ice fields, mountains, rivers and forests, staged, shot and montaged in forensic detail. There are dreams of the future, dreams of transformation, rising from the ashes of a mucky, complex past.

Akomfrah treats projects like a delicate recipe. The cooked parts are predefined ideas resulting from lengthy periods of research. The raw bits are what he terms the “magic of mistake”: space for discovery, accidents and chance. So when does he know when it’s time to stop looking and start making? “I don’t!” he laughs. “And that is a very big danger on projects like this. At some point, I have to be literally wrenched from one to the other. I think the trick is to not spend too much time doing one thing with the idea that somehow there’ll be closure.”

I ask about the moment he found out he’d be representing Britain at the 2024 Venice Biennale. “Well, you’re called. But before you’re called, your gallery [Lisson] is called to see whether you’re available, so they know before you do!” he chuckles. “Your heart picks up pace, partly because you know what the responsibility is and partly because you’ve had friends do it. So you’re like, ‘Okay, did I like what they went through?’” Discussing the Venice project, titled Listening All Night To The Rain, Akomfrah keeps things broad and cryptic, explaining that the work will share affinities with his last four films. “It’s not a radical departure; the genesis of each project is in the ashes of the last.”

The significance of the British Pavilion building is not lost in the context of Akomfrah’s work. It is a literal relic of colonialism. Built in 1909 shortly before the British Empire became the largest in history, it is a monument to an era of global occupation, soon to be occupied by an artist whose work excavates histories unseen and the consequences of ‘heroism’.

The Venice commission will continue Akomfrah’s investigation into memory, migration, racial injustice and climate change. Like Arcadia, it will probe the connections between eras and geographies in a non-linear format. But this time, there are eight interlocking screens with an emphasis on sonic experiences (or acoustemology, a term referring to an understanding of the world via sound), and as Akomfrah describes, “listening as activism in the mind.”

My time is up and I’ve missed my train back, and three that went after it. The next will take an hour longer. I didn’t imagine an interview with John Akomfrah would involve a seven-hour round trip for a 15-minute conversation. But perhaps such a journey is only fitting for an artist whose medium is time, and whose core subject is the movement of people across the Earth. Plus, it’s nothing on the 66 days it took the Pilgrims to sail from Plymouth in search of the New World.

Arcadia is often used as a synonym for utopia. They both idealise a world that is ultimately unreachable; but while utopia idealises the future, arcadia looks to a lost, or unlived way of life; a state of bygone harmony with nature uncorrupted by civilisation – that there, we might find ourselves. But as Akomfrah’s work illustrates, someone’s arcadia is, all too often, another’s dystopia.