Vertigo Sea

John Akomfrah
Born in Accra, Ghana, in 1957.
He lives and works in London, UK.

John Akomfrah is widely known as a founding member of Black Audio Film Collective (BAFC), a British cine-cultural workshop whose films, videos, and slide presentations responded to the rising racial tensions that defined the UK during the 1980s. The collective was founded in 1982, a year after the infamous Brixton riots, where protests in South London over economic disparity and racial disadvantage escalated into several days of violent clashes with local police. The inherent political and social urgency of this time was greatly influenced by BAFC’s mission and practice.
The members of BAFC brought diverse backgrounds in sociology, psychology, and art into their experimental approach to filmmaking, which betrayed a close engagement with postcolonial and semiotic theory. Works such as Expeditions (1985) and Handsworth Songs (1986) combined or intercut contemporary and archival footage, political speeches, colonial-era images, and philosophical texts in order to present fragmented, nonlinear narratives that linked British imperialism, postwar immigration, and contemporary racism. Handsworth Songs, for instance, addressed both the structural underpinnings of modern race riots and the problematic ways in which such events are narrated in mainstream media, concerns shared with such seminal cultural theorists as Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy.
Akomfrah’s use of montage in individual works is extended in a further act of appropriation across his oeuvre at large, reflecting a style that he calls his “recycling aesthetic.” His contribution to the 2015 Biennale di Venezia, titled Vertigo Sea (2015), enlists this approach in combining archival material with newly shot footage in a piece inspired by two literary works, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) and Heathcote Williams’s Whale Nation (1988). Influenced by poetic interpretations of the “sublime seas,” Akomfrah’s film stages the ocean as a contact zone: a site of exchange, hybridity, and transience.
Vertigo Sea also addresses the “moral economies” at play in the troubling relationship between humans and our environment— defined by greed, terror, and the use of natural life as a resource for commercial profit and personal gain. The sea becomes a metaphor for shifting conceptions of identity and emotional awareness, illustrated through stunning marine landscapes or documentations of humanity’s destructive actions.