Unsuspected geographies

[Lire la version française]

Iain Chambers, specialist in Cultural
and Postcolonial Studies

Based on a work of quotation and reference, John Akomfrah, a British artist of Ghanaian origin, reveals the influence and domination of Western art history on the imaginary of migration. A decolonial perspective that questions the way our cultural unconscious shapes our visions of the world.

In John Akomfrah’s film The Nine Muses (2010) we encounter a stri­kingly poetical alle­gory on post-1945 immi­gra­tion in Britain. We see a black male body in the frozen land­scapes of the far North. His presence disturbs and inter­ro­gates the Western canon : both its sense of history and aesthe­tics. Caspar David Friedrich’s The Wanderer Above the Mists (1818), Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) and Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narra­tive of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) now offer hospi­ta­lity to a black man in a yellow parka contem­pla­ting Arctic infi­nity. The repe­ti­tion of accre­dited words and imagery (Samuel Beckett, T.S. Eliot, John Milton…) unders­cores the mythical quality of the odyssey of migra­tion from the Carib­bean, Africa and the Indian sub-conti­nent to the waste­land of post-war Britain. The images of Euro­pean culture are not simply copied. They are appro­priated, reworked and released into another way of telling. They now bear witness to an ignored trajec­tory that arrives from the souths of the world. The images acquire another life. Their transit and trans­la­tion trans­form our very unders­tan­ding of modern space and time. Dismant­ling claims of property – Who do the images belong to ? Who is narra­ting whom ? – they take us elsew­here, into another, less exclu­sive, critical space. 

As an artist and indi­vi­dual John Akom­frah refuses to be simply ‘black’, British and of Ghanaian descent. Refu­ting a narrow idea of exile, his work explores the social and poli­tical poten­tials of migra­tion. It promotes what the British-Jamaican critic Stuart Hall — the subject of Akomfrah’s film, The Stuart Hall Project^[1]John Akom­frah, The Stuart Hall Project, docu­men­tary, 2013, 99 min, British Film Insti­tute. Watch the film (on subscrip­tion) : https://​player​.bfi​.org​.uk/​s​u​b​s​c​r​i​p​t​i​o​n​/​f​i​l​m​/​w​a​t​c​h​-​t​h​e​-​s​t​u​a​r​t​-​h​a​l​l​-​p​r​o​j​e​c​t​-​2​0​1​3​-​online (2013) — would have called a diasporic aesthe­tics. The refusal to accept a fixed place in the order of history, visual culture and aesthe­tics, inter­rupts the sequen­tial fina­lity of art history and the idea­lised concep­tion of the artist. It also frees unders­tan­dings of migra­tion from the empi­rical realism that frames it in a precise socio-economic cate­gory. Through a visual poetics, the concept of migra­tion lite­rally migrates. This migra­ting moder­nity confuses and confutes the cate­go­ries that seek to contain its cultural and histo­rical chal­lenge. It signals and unco­vers a compo­site history that unwinds across the whole pano­rama of modern Britain (and Europe). It cannot be reduced to a limited iden­ti­fi­ca­tion in ‘race’, ‘migra­tion’ or ‘iden­tity’. 

If Akomfrah’s trajec­tory through moder­nity, and across the worlds of modern art and aesthe­tics, proposes a precise enga­ge­ment with that inhe­ri­tance from a ‘black’ pers­pec­tive, it is never­the­less irre­du­cible to such a posi­tion or iden­tity. For his visual language, a montage of filmed sequences, docu­men­tary images and cut-up^[2]A poetic writing prac­tice invented by William Burroughs., produces the video essay and a critical gaze that is internal to the Occi­dental archive and its plane­tary preten­sions. We reco­gnise the images, register the words, receive the sounds. Their ‘black­ness’ does not lie in an appeal to a sepa­rate alte­rity, but rather in the radical decom­po­si­tion and recom­po­si­tion of the audio-visual mate­rial confi­gured by the subal­tern insis­tence that the world is neither complete nor uniform. Akomfrah’s visual language speaks of the colo­nial consti­tu­tion of open wounds and a justice yet to come.

In Peripe­teia (2012) we again encounter black figures in a north Euro­pean rural land­scape. The video returns us to Albert Dürer’s studies of a black male and a female figures at the begin­ning of the sixteenth century. Matter seemingly out of place pushes the exis­ting histo­rical narra­tive, and its arran­ge­ment of knowing the world, out of joint. Pulled out of the archive of Euro­pean art this visual figu­ra­tion suggests that the world is wider and far more than us. The formal beauty of the work bears a critical supple­ment. Our moder­nity has always been accom­pa­nied and made, however violently, by others. This suggests that we look, listen and learn from what exceeds and refutes our authorisation. 

All of Akomfrah’s work involves a conti­nual enga­ge­ment with the histo­rical, cultural and aesthetic archives of the West, expo­sing their under­side and the repres­sive mecha­nisms of repre­sen­ta­tion. If Africa or the Americas have been an inte­gral part of moder­nity from its very begin­ning, if slavery, colo­nia­lism and empire are central to the history of the modern poli­tical economy, then they are also deeply inscribed in the forma­tion of Western demo­cratic insti­tu­tions and their visions of ‘freedom’. The deep, and unack­now­ledged, paradox that our freedom and rights are based on the struc­tural exclu­sion of freedom and rights to others, is some­thing that Frantz Fanon and James Baldwin never tired of repea­ting. Cros­sing Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, or J.M.W. Turner’s seas­capes, as in his work Vertigo Sea (2015), chasing the connec­tions to an Afro­fu­tu­rism sedi­mented in the archives of black music in The Last Angel of History (1996), Akom­frah invites us to see Occi­dental aesthe­tics being split from itself to accom­mo­date other histo­ries, others. There is no outside. At this point, within a moder­nity that is never simply ours to narrate, illus­trate and imagine, every histo­rical moment becomes a cross­roads, offe­ring passages taken and not taken, lives both reco­gnised and refused. A sequen­tial account breaks down in the mix. Offi­cial accounts are dubbed and creo­lised to libe­rate the repressed from esta­bli­shed representations.