John Akomfrah Research Articles

Black Ephemera: The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive

Black Ephemera: The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive

A formação simbólica do arquivo mineiro: som e imagem enquanto veículo da memória

This article discusses two artworks – The Miner, sound design performance, 2020 and Fragments of the Cage, multimedia installation, 2021 – that address and explore artistically the archive of the mining work from São Pedro da Cova, the role that the evocation of these workers memories represents and, therefore, the meanings present in both works that, through sound and image and their relationships, have used the heritage of memory to invoke the identity and path of the miner’s life. Thinking of memory as a space for reflection becomes relevant in the environment of a contemporary world that often leaves us both alienated and besieged. In the context of contemporary artistic creation, and particularly the space of performance and installation, the archive has a central contribution in the necessary “emotional inscription” of memory as a vehicle for the awareness of reality. The evocation of the miner occupies this space of consciousness, since the history and memory of these workers, and what unites them in the past as in the present, are, after all, their consciousness that they spent their lives digging up wealth that only brought them misery. Through the analysis of John Akomfrah’s film works, his vision of the artistic treatment of the archive, and the extensive heritage of documentary films about the workers from the São Pedro da Cova’s mining exploration, the realization of both artworks prospects the archive as vehicle for allegorical associations and discursive formations, seeking through sound and image the presence of another body of memory.

“I wanted to become an Abyssinian”: Rewriting Indro Montanelli’s memories of colonial Africa in Francesca Melandri’s Sangue giusto (2017)

ABSTRACT This article focuses on journalist Indro Montanelli’s memories of Destà/Fatìma or Fatuma, the 12-year-old child he bought as his “wife” while he was a volunteer in the 1935 Italo-Ethiopian war, and on a colonial narrative echoing his story in the 2017 novel Sangue giusto by Francesca Melandri. It considers the roles of race, gender, sexuality, and national memory in the texts, moving from the debate around the monument dedicated to the prominent journalist in the city of Milan to the analysis of the power dynamics in the novel. John Akomfrah’s notion of memory as “a deconstructive gesture against white mythologies” and Aimé Césaire’s and Michel Foucault’s idea of memory as counter-cartography are used to analyse both Montanelli’s recollections of Destà and the relationship between Attilio Profeti, the main character of Melandri’s novel, and Ababa, the girl he turned into his servant and lover during the fascist occupation of Ethiopia.

Purple by John Akomfrah: Confronting Human Histories with Deep Time in the Anthropocene

Purple by John Akomfrah: Confronting Human Histories with Deep Time in the Anthropocene

Media Primitivism: Technological Art in Africa By Delinda Collier

Media Primitivism: Technological Art in Africa By Delinda Collier

An Angel, a Thief, and a Mothership: Imaginative Considerations of Black Being

Among the artists and music critics within the black sci-fi community interviewed for the film The Last Angel of History, Director John Akomfrah interweaves the narrative of the Data Thief who is on a quest to find the mythical crossroads. As a juncture marked by transience and inhabited by time travelers, the crossroads is where secret black technology is forged. The famous legend says that Robert Johnson learned the blues by selling his soul to the devil. The blues was a secret due to its transformative power to replicate and recode itself into several musical genres thereafter. The Data Thief, a cyborg-like fictional character, searches 200 years after Paul Johnson’s discovery to find the mythical crossroads to obtain the keys to his future. His journey commences with one spoken clue: “Mothership Connection.” Drawing from the narrative of the Data Thief and the allusion to Parliament’s 1975 album that situates blackness in outer space through funk music, this essay examines the ways in which inhabitants of the crossroads, the Data Thief and George Clinton in particular, produce a new expressive order against the grain of a nebulous history imposed upon them by dominant white cultural representations. Through a reorganizing of black aesthetics, critical theory and liberation politics, this article highlights how black artists manipulate and imaginatively transcend linear time and make history beyond the Middle Passage epistemology. The movements of these artists collide with theories of spacetime borrowed from science fiction in service of theorizing black performance.

O poder da videoarte e do cinema negros na arte contemporânea

This paper provides a critical framework to discuss the history of Black Film traditions in contemporary visual art. Since production of video art started in 1960, Black video and video performance artists had until now little visibility, were unrecognized and under-researched as they should have been. The paper aims to show the role of the Canadian video artists: Stan Douglas, Sylvia D. Hamilton, Michele Pearson Clarke; Brazilian artists: Ayrson Heraclito, Renata Felinto; and the South Africa Filmmaker and artist John Akomfrah; in redefining black identity. The works of these artists are very important to addressing black aesthetics in contemporary art films and video art in the present times of social change, black activism and Post-blackness philosophical movement. These artists discuss blackness, diversity, diaspora, and deconstruct a white Eurocentrism narrative and explores the complexity of the contemporary art scenes of Africa and video art of the Americas. This is of paramount importance to the role of black Films in the arts, as well as to decolonize artistic institutions, in addition to showing the importance of black video art and film. I will present a discourse on the works of the above mentioned artists, as they are engaged with political culture, and they make references in their oeuvre to African roots, race, gender, politics, society, and culture. These artists raise the social practice and contemporary issues for black people. It is important to emphasize their black video art contributes to this rise in the reshaping of black identity in art and in Film studies.

“They shall not grow old” and “Mimesis: African soldier”

This paper will examine and compare two recent visual explorations of the experience of soldiers in World War I. Director Peter Jackson’s documentary They Shall Not Grow Old has been called an immersive, haunting and often transcendent experience that’s unlike anything you’ve ever seen before. By using modern digital film technology, he has restored the visuals and added sounds and speech via Automatic Dialogue Replacement, colorized, changed the speed, and brought 3D depth to the old footage from the Imperial War Museum. Jackson has either, using the terminology of William Guynn (Unspeakable Histories: Film and the Experience of Catastrophe), employed this technology to trigger “moments of heightened awareness in which the reality of the past may be recovered in its material being”. Or, do these computer generated technological affects, “….stand in for the ‘truth’ and obscure just how constructed the ‘history’ Jackson is telling actually is?” John Akomfrah’s video/sound three screen performance/display installation Mimesis: African Soldier uses silent actors, archive film and photographs, ethnographic sound recordings, new filmed footage with and without actors, and a sound track by Trevor Mathison, to document the experience of those, among many, left out of Jackson’s film: colonial subjects as soldiers. Akomfrah “does not put colour back in the cheeks of the dead”, but rather warns the viewer that remembrance can come in many forms, some of them unrealiable. All of this leads to a conclusion, as Avishai Margalit put it in Ethics of Memory, that “memory…is knowledge from the past. It is not necessarily knowledge about the past.”

Johanne Løgstrup, Co-existence of Times – A Conversation with John Akomfrah

L’entretien que Johanne Logstrup a mene avec l’artiste John Akomfrah est publie dans le quatorzieme volume d’une serie d’ouvrages monographiques dirigee par Geoff Cox et Jacob Lund chez Sternberg Press. Chacun de ces ouvrages, concus dans un format synthetique et privilegiant un graphisme epure avec une iconographie selective, consiste a orienter la pensee vers la thematique principale de la collection intitulee La Condition contemporaine [The Contemporary Condition]. La question de la tempor...

The Jurisgenerativity of a Liquid Praxis

Abstract liquid blackness founder Alessandra Raengo talks with filmmaker and installation artist John Akomfrah about the emergence of the trope of liquidity in his work, in the context of the reversibility between aesthetics, practice, and praxis exhibited since his output with the Black Audio Film Collective, and about the intellectual errantry of his practice ever since. Together they explore liquidity as a feature of double consciousness, a way to comprehend the dispersion of the polyrhythmic, and a key to approach the aesthetic philosophy of collective praxis.

John Akomfrah’s Nine Muses: A Reading with Glissant’s “Relation” and Quantum Entanglement

John Akomfrah's film The Nine Muses (2010, United Kingdom) deals with the theme of the journey across the great works of literature. In particular the film sets the works of the Western canon, from Homer's epic Odyssey to Joyce's Malloy, within the visual frame of archival footage dealing with the Windrush Generation, that is, Caribbean Black migration to England following World War II. In counterpoint to that set of visuals Akomfrah has created a futurist set of scenes set in Alaska, and the frozen northlands, to which the concept of exile from the tropical settings of the Caribbean or Africa might seem most extreme. This article will provide an analysis of the journey and exile motifs utilizing the framing of Glissant's notion of Relation, primarily, and secondarily the quantum concept of entanglement.

Venice Biennale May We Live in Interesting Times curated by Ralph Rugoff

Venice Biennale May We Live in Interesting Times curated by Ralph Rugoff

Artists in the face of threats of climate change

In contemporary visual culture, the subject of climate change and the need for commitment to counteract it (Demos, 2016, Körber et al., 2017, Tsing et al., 2017) are increasingly being addressed. The artists' observation concerns not only the natural effects of climate change but also their impact on the social and cultural heritage of the inhabitants of regions of the most endangered areas. Areas most vulnerable to destruction: oceans, coral reefs and polar regions are becoming a particular subject of interest for artists. A reflection of this interest can be the increasing number of exhibitions devoted to the current state of the environment (i.e. the project Plasticity of the Planet presented in 2019 in Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw). In the article selected artistic strategies to publicize the problems of ecology will be indicated. The first strategy is the exhibition of the beauty of the natural environment and the melancholy associated with its disappearance. An example of this can be Art of the Arctic by environmental photographer Kerry Koeping who focuses the audience's attention on ocean literacy by means of affecting landscapes of the Arctic or the artistic residence in PAN Hornsund Polar Station of Janusz Oleksa. The second way is to indicate the physical and biological effects of climate change. An example would be the work of Kelly Jazvac who, in collaboration with an oceanographer Charles Moore and a geologist Patricia Corcoran, presents plastiglomerate by Agnieszka Kurant – new forms of fossils, resulting from the combination of shells and stones with plastics or artificial compounds. The third method is the presentation of the residents' experience. The examples are works of Subhankar Banerjee, who draws inspiration from ethnographic research and documentary films and Jakub Witek's documentary about Polish emigrants living in Iceland. The artist presents the consequences of climate change for the inhabitants of the polar regions. The fourth way is to build a metaphor for the presence of a ‘stranger’ – a traveller, an explorer or a scientist. An example is a photographic performance entitled Polaris Summer by Kuba Bąkowski conducted during a scientific expedition to Spitsbergen, or three-screen projection by John Akomfrah's showing the relationship between man and oceans in the context of exploitation of natural and human resources. For the artistic practices described in the article, I use the theoretical framework of environmental art that binds together aesthetics, ethics and politics. The purpose of the article is to check whether such a connection can be attractive to the audience.

A Call from Inside the House: Broadcasting the Black Audio Film Collective's Postcolonial Critiques on Channel 4

This article resituates four British films from the Black Audio Film Collective (BAFC) in the context of their televisual broadcast on Channel 4. First, the article traces the history of Channel 4's intersection with experimental film and its role in funding the BAFC's films. It then places John Akomfrah's Testament (1988) and Seven Songs for Malcolm X (1993) and Reece Auguiste's Twilight City (1989) and Mysteries of July (1991) in conversation with theories of televisual time. It deploys Homi Bhabha's concept of the postcolonial time-lag to explore how television theories of liveness and flow are reinterpreted by the BAFC to subvert the promise of televisual presence. In particular, it focuses on how the direct use of televisual archives and address of the television news in combination with poetic narration allow the BAFC to dwell in the personal stories of diasporic women and to mourn the deaths of black men, using the space and tools of television to show how trauma lingers long past its broadcast on the nightly news.

John Akomfrah e Isaac Julien: migrando entre ideas, formas y plataformas de exhibición

The Afro-diasporic artistsan Isaac Julien (Londres, 1960) and John Akomfrah (Ghana, 1957) have overtaken international museums and galleries in recent years. Their writings, their public presentations, and their extensive careers, with works that travel across numerous spaces (cinema, television screen, white cube) have reached a unique position among those of the black diaspora, have allowed them to devote themselves freely to multi-screen works. In their recent manifesto works ‘Purple’ (Akomfrah, 2018) and ‘Playtime’ and ‘Kapital’ (Julien, 2013-4), they reveal strategies and formal tools that resituate our perceptions, inviting us to reflect on an array of contemporary emergencies: the ecological crisis, global warming, and racialized global capitalism. The transformed audiovisual language that emerges from their essayistic works in the multi-screen format creates new critical and radical forms of perception among audiences.

John Akomfrah

This article considers recent films by the artist John Akomfrah (b. 1957, Ghana). It argues that Vertigo Sea, The Airport, and Purple exemplify a new phase of black British art production. While building on the methods and themes that characterize his time with the Black Audio Film Collective, these projects exemplify ways in which diasporic histories provide crucial insights into the early twenty-first century—notably around questions of national sovereignty, spaces of flow and mobility, and human interventions in shared ecosystems. Ultimately, these films present a way of “doing history,” a form of visual genealogy Akomfrah calls “an essay” that is suited to a landscape in which fixed temporal or spatial narratives are no longer adequate.

Afrofuturism and the archive

© Liverpool University Press. This article is concerned with questions of history, memory and meaning, and with the construction of Afrofuturism as both an archive and a living tradition. It will begin by outlining the origins of the term, and consider how its naming and initial explication in a popular article by Mark Sinker, interviews by Mark Dery and a film by John Akomfrah functioned as preliminary archivings, which in turn became parts of the archive they inaugurated. It will then turn to two recent Afrofuturist films which deal with history, temporality, semiosis and transformation in intriguing ways: Kibwe Tavares's six-minute short, Robots of Brixton (UK 2011), and Miguel Llanso's short feature, Crumbs (Ethiopia/Spain/Finland 2015).

Note from the Editor

162 CLA JOURNAL Note from the Editor Since the release of issue 61.3,CLA Journal has settled into a mutually beneficial relationship with the digital library powerhouse JSTOR and has already begun to receive impressive statistics on the extent of its national and global reach. With the publication of 61.4, I am proud to announce yet another sea change in the journal’s operations: an official CLA Journal Submission Portal! Longtime CLA members and former contributors will note that this new online tool will be a radical departure from past procedures that required authors to send their submissions along with supporting material directly to the editor. What followed then was a string of emails between author and editor that began with an acknowledgement of the initial submission to a final determination of its fate. Of course, if the submission was accepted with required minor or major revisions, a new round of emails emerged. Fortunately, the newly installed CLAJ Submission Portal software will significantly streamline communications for both author and editor. In addition to its capability to receive uploaded essay submissions, the portal will be set up to receive both solicited and unsolicited book reviews and to provide the Book Review Editor with a central online site for communicating in real-time with book review authors. On behalf of the CLA Journal’s Editorial Board, I sincerely welcome this latest upgrade! New submission procedures aside, the critical rigor and intellectual acumen on display in the five essays included in this pivotal issue remain the unchanging hallmark of CLAJ. Rachel Watson’s lead essay, “Blood Typing: Rudolph Fisher’s The Conjure-Man Dies,” considers how Rudolph Fisher, a prominent radiologist and writer trained at Howard University’s Medical School, thematizes the scientific gaze in his literary work to challenge dominant racial ideologies of the period and how this innovation articulated with the rise of forensic identification techniques and the modern American detective story. She argues that, in The Conjure-Man Dies (1932)—often considered the first African American detective novel—this scientific gaze sees “beyond” the boundaries of skin and social visibility in order to solve a murder mystery that otherwise appears supernaturally caused. She further holds that the same gaze also asserts the emptiness of biologized racial difference— the ideology that undergirded the legal and social logic of Jim Crow. Ultimately, her essay suggests that the real “protagonist” of the story is the epistemological method itself and that, for Fisher, the political value of the detection genre lay in its evocation of a deeply “rational” engagement with the social world—putting both science and literature to work together against the regime of Jim Crow. Carlyn E. Ferrari’s essay, “Anne Spencer’s ‘Natural’ Poetics,” bridges the discourse on Black female writers’ self-representation through discursive strategies and literary ecocriticism to illustrate how Anne Spencer articulates Black woman- CLA JOURNAL 163 Note from the Editor hood through ecocentric language and natural world imagery. She positions Spencer as a part of a rich tradition of Black women writers who map the experiences of Black womanhood onto the natural world as a vehicle through which to envision Black women’s liberation. Her essay highlights traditional ecocriticism’s failure to take race and gender fully into account and explores the place of the natural world and ecological materialities in Black women’s literature. While the Afrofuturist film Black Panther (2017) featured an African nation with technologies advanced far beyond the rest of the world, this representation of blacknessassupremelytechnologicallyadeptdepartsfromevenrecentdepictionsof blackness as more authentically human and therefore antithetical to technology. In many ways,Afrofuturism began as recuperation of neglected black voices engaging with the technologies of their day and imagining those of the future. However, as Afrofuturism has grown in scope and visibility, multiple theoretical voices have contributed metaphors for understanding the links between black histories of science and technology and the imaginary exploration of these in literature, music, and artwork, blurring the boundaries between what is inspirational fiction and literal engagement with technology. In her essay, “The Data Thief, the Cyberflaneur,and Rhythm Science:ChallengingAnti-Technological Blackness with the Metaphors of Afrofuturism,” Cassandra Jones explores metaphors from three major contributors to Afrofuturism: John Akomfrah...

Capitalocene, clichés, and critical re-enchantment. What Akomfrah’s Vertigo Sea does through BBC nature

ABSTRACTIn the montage of archival and original material that makes up John Akomfrah's three-channel video work Vertigo Sea (2015), the frequent use of footage shot by BBCs Natural History Unit (producers of series like Planet Earth) stands out as an unusual choice. This article explores aesthetic-political implications of how this material is subtly repurposed, with focus on one of the interconnected issues dealt with in the work: nature and the Capitaloscene. What does Vertigo Sea do to and through these BBC nature images? Which artistic strategies are involved and for which ends? Is the kind of ecological pathos already framing the original material itself critically transformed and if so in which senses? Does Vertigo Sea merely go for a reproduction of the natural beauty often attributed to original material, and as simply juxtaposed with terrible images, or does the repurposing also entail an alteration of the very notion of natural beauty? This article critically explores all these questions mainly through the frameworks of Situationist détournement, Deleuze's ideas about art and clichés, and Adorno's notions of authentic art, re-enchantment, and natural beauty—frameworks that are conversely critically discussed through Vertigo Sea. It aims to reveal Vertigo Sea as on the one hand an experiment in finding vital artistic strategies for re-enchanting (in non-idealizing ways) planetary nature in the Capitalocene, and as on the on the other hand a thematization of the difficulties in doing so. While appearing among a contemporary art scene increasingly concerned with local and/or global relations having to do with ecology in this new era, Vertigo Sea presents us with a highly original case primarily through its unusual choice of main source material and its complex treatment of this material.

The Data Thief, the Cyberflaneur, and Rhythm Science: Challenging Anti-Technological Blackness with the Metaphors of Afrofuturism

202 CLA JOURNAL The Data Thief, the Cyberflaneur, and Rhythm Science: Challenging Anti-Technological Blackness with the Metaphors of Afrofuturism Cassandra L. Jones Among the many notable aspects of Black Panther (2017) is the fictional, and secret, African nation of Wakanda, rich in vibranium, an equally fictional element that fuels all Wakandan technology. Not only has this nevercolonized nation been able to retain control of their natural resource and the wealth it engenders, Wakandans have developed technologies more advanced than those of any other nation. While Black Panther stands out as an exciting addition to the superheroes of the Marvel universe—and the film is replete with Africana people in a gamut of roles as warriors, leaders, farmers, heroes, and villains—it likewise represents an important development in the representation of blackness as technologically adept. Shuri, spearheading Wakanda’s cutting-edge research program, creates an array of stunning new technologies that empower the embattled Wakandan leader, T’Challa, and the Dora Milaje in their attempt to save Wakanda. Even in the second decade of the 21st century, this remains a fairly revelatory representation of blackness and black technological prowess. We have seen filmic images of Africana people as individually adept, outliers in an otherwise white landscape, in the films of the 1980s and 1990s. In these films, lone black men—from Richard Pryor in Superman 3 and Clarence Gilyard Jr. in Die Hard to Samuel L. Jackson in Jurassic Park—held positions of technological power (and dubious morals). However, even franchises like The Matrix, which take place in highly technological futures populated with large numbers of people from various races, pit machines against humans while racializing that technology as white. Self-replicating white agents seek to destroy the last bastion of humanity, Zion, the heart of which is a “primitive” cave location flooded with markers of blackness and other forms of non-whiteness, thereby highlighting the distinction between embodied humans as symbolically black and the world of the machines as white. Black Panther’s contrast with this fairly common depiction of blackness as the antithesis of technology is part of what makes the 2017 film such a striking departure. That this representation occurred in an Afrofuturist film is no surprise. Although often discussed as only an aesthetic or literary field of study that examines black science fiction, fantasy, and myth, perhaps overly concerned with popular culture as some critics have maintained, Alondra Nelson defines Afrofuturism CLA JOURNAL 203 as “the intersection between African diasporic culture and technology through literature, poetry, science fiction and speculative fiction, music, visual art, and the Internet […] maintain[ing] that racial identity fundamentally influences technocultural practices” (“Afrofuturism”). Afrofuturism equally includes an examination of Afrocentric metaphysics, theoretical and applied science, social sciences, and programmatic spaces (Anderson and Jones). Asking us to imagine possible black futures while never losing sight of the connections of the past and present to these futures, Afrofuturism examines the many realms with which these therapeutic imaginings intersect.1 In many ways, Afrofuturism began as a recuperation of neglected black voices engaging with the technologies of their day and imagining those of the future. However, as Afrofuturism has grown in scope and visibility, multiple theoretical voices have contributed metaphors for understanding the links between black historiesof engagementwithscienceandtechnologyandtheimaginaryexploration of these in literature, music, and artwork, blurring the boundaries between what might be considered inspirational fiction and literal engagement with technology. Outside the realms of scholarship specifically exploring the relationship of race and technology, technology is often described as objective and ahistoric, a tendency that elides the racism from the level of the institution down to the very codeinformingthemachines.TheseAfrofuturistmetaphorsdrawdeepconnections to the past, rendering visible the rich fibers connecting black history and culture with the history of technology. This article explores these metaphors from three major contributors to Afrofuturism—John Akomfrah’s “data thief,”Anna Everett’s “black cyberflaneur” and “Afrogeek,” and Paul D. Miller’s “rhythm science”—and their power to combat the construction of blackness as not just disconnected from technology but as the very anti-thesis of it. Among these three, the first to appear is Akomfrah’s 1996 poetic documentary, The Last Angel of History. The short film explores the utopian view...