For many artists, it would be hard to know how to begin to respond to the vast human tragedy of last summer’s migration crises. What greater understanding of say, Aylan Kurdi’s terrible end – washed up, aged 3 on a Turkish beach last September – could be engendered through fiction or interpretation, rather than by a straightforward telling of the facts?
Difficult though it may be to get right, art does have a role in addressing human catastrophes – and British filmmaker John Akomfrah’s mesmerising, poetic meditations on the long history of forced migration create a wide lens to help us make sense of contemporary horror.
For three decades the 58-year-old artist has been making films that address the legacy of slavery, colonialism and war on human life. And for Akomfrah, countering the racist “rhetoric of contagion” that has arisen in European responses to recent refugee crises has become more necessary than ever.
“We act as though the current refugee crisis is an isolated incident,” Akomfrah said last month, “but actually flight and migration has defined modernity since the 14th century.” In a series of several new films, varying in length from 40-50 minutes, screened at London’s Lisson Gallery and Bristol’s Arnolfini Gallery, Akomfrah takes on the supremely ambitious challenge of placing these stories of human displacement, death and suffering not just in their historical context but their geographical natural context: above all, in the unforgiving, roiling seas.
Vertigo Sea – like all of these new films, largely non-linear and impressionistic – is unrelenting in the way it bombards the onlooker with imagery. It is a triptych, the three screens packed with different information, a constantly thought-provoking succession of juxtapositions. At times, the sea becomes a thing of transcendent beauty, its towering waves crashing down as they might in a surf film or nature documentary, and indeed, some of the footage Akomfrah uses is taken from the BBC's Natural History Unit. Fish struggle in nets, flocks of migrating birds circle overhead and polar bears cautiously explore a vista of shattered ice stretching to the horizon: the latter increasingly associated with a homeland ruined by the reckless expansion of European empires.
Some of the footage is new, made by Akomfrah. Other parts, such as the silent, jittery black-and-white footage of early 20th century explorers, must also come from the BBC – an institution with its own historically problematic relationship with empire. The history of slavery and empire contained in these waters, in a time when “Britannia ruled the waves”, is wove into the violence of modern forced migration across the Mediterranean: chained slaves being taken from Africa, black bodies washed up on the beach, while another, in traditional naval finery, gazes out to sea. “Every Wednesday, 20-30 people were designated to die,” says a voice-over, “thrown into the waters of the South Atlantic”.
With three relatively fast-moving screens, the ideas come thick and fast, and repeat viewing is desirable, if not essential. The twinkling greens and blues of the Northern Lights elegantly disperse and realign like shoals of fish – at times Vertigo Sea echoes the classic 1982 film Koyaanisqatsi, framed to collide the abject horror and beauty of the natural world with what humans have done to it and in it; unwilling or unable to learn from the wretched history of forced migrations and destabilising violence.
Another of Akomfrah's new films, Auto Da Fé (meaning act of faith), makes the connections between these histories of displacement more linear and explicit. This time running on two simultaneous screens, the film moves through 400 years of historical migrations caused by religious persecution, beginning with the 1654 flight of Sephardic Jews from Catholic Brazil to Barbados, to Huguenots escaping persecution in France, right up to 2014, when Christians forced to leave Mosul in Iraq.
A mostly wordless chain of period dramas, Akomfrah filmed the shots on location in Barbados – but the points of departure and arrival almost blur into one, universalised by their placelessness. In transit, the modern-day migrants wear life jackets and look fearfully out to the blank and featureless sea, towards new homes that are yet to appear, or back at the receding ones that have forsaken them. The question ‘where is home?’ is one that preoccupies Akomfrah’s filmmaking – he was born in Ghana and moved to Britain at the age of 4.
In his superb 2013 film The Stuart Hall Project, Akomfrah's feature-length homage to the late intellectual, Jamaican-born Hall explained how mixed ancestry such as his own, formed through empire, had created the complex racial, cultural and national identities of the 21st century. "I can't go back to any one origin," Hall said. "I'd have to go back to five. When I ask people where they're from now, I expect to be told an extremely long story".
Another of Akomfrah's new films, The Airport, also a triptych, is the most enigmatic of the lot. Set in an abandoned airfield near Athens, it is an almost-dreamlike sequence of scenes, featuring a small cast drawn from different historical epochs that includes an astronaut in full spacesuit, a flamenco guitarist, an air hostess and a gorilla. The ghosts of departures past haunt the terminal building, as puddles gather on the floor and weeds sprout up in the empty runway. The triptych effect can be almost vertigo-inducing at times, or at least slightly nauseating – when the camera pans on three different landscapes simultaneously, each one from a different viewpoint, it seems to make the floor beneath our feet move, like having a train move alongside the one you are on and being unsure whether it is your train or the one you are looking at that is moving.
Away from the airport, the astronaut performs the same ritual as characters in all Akomfrah’s new films: standing alone, staring out to sea – this time a colossal cargo ship looms in the distance, performing the kind of crossing so vital to the acquisition of modern riches. At points we do see the city of Athens itself, but only from up on a high hill, the busy, bustling metropolitan life subsumed. Instead, the mostly solitary actors walk along the empty airport runways, eventually walking together, in step, but without sharing glances or communicating – travellers from different eras unable to share that which they have in common. “I’m a born bricoleur,” Akomfrah confesses in the exhibition notes. “I love the way that things that are otherwise discrete and self-contained start to suggest things once they are forced into a dialogue with something else.”
In Auto Da Fé, the players carry large, cheap-but-sturdy chequered laundry bags, presumably containing what remains of their possessions, and wait by the side of the road for a ride that never comes, or stand shin-deep in the surf staring out to sea, always transitory. Once or twice, the imagery is unsubtle to the point of mawkishness. The flotsam washing up on the shore includes a child's doll and flotation armbands that have long since lost the human they were attached to, juxtaposed with a shot of ancient gravestones on the second screen. But when reality itself has recently provided television viewers around the world with such gut-punching images, it is hard to argue with Akomfrah's choices here. Indeed, he is right to ensure that these fictionalised and historical mini-narratives do not allow us to forget the now.
In Vertigo Sea, snippets of a news reporter's voice describe seaborne migrants climbing onto tuna cages for dear life, exhausted, boats taking on water and "14 dead bodies found floating in the sea". The most deadening words of all are the reporter's reference to the tragedies that have occurred in "this year's crossings".
Akomfrah’s dazzling new films remind us of what has already happened, but do not let us forget that these horrific human upheavals continue, and will continue year upon year.
Dan Hancox is a regular contributor to The Review. His work can be found in The Guardian, Prospect and New Statesman.