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20 THE NEW REVIEW | 01. 1 0. 17 | The Observer

SCIENCE & TECH

‘PROGRESS

CAN CAUSE

PROFOUND

SUFFERING’

For British artist John Akomfrah,

global warming, the subject of his

ambitious new video installation, is

a process rooted in technology and

exploitation. By Sean O’Hagan

requires the viewer to surrender to

sensory overload, while remaining

alert to the often oblique connections

being made throughout. “I kept

thinking back, while making this work,

to the local, working-class community

I grew up in and how innocent we were

in terms of trusting authority. One of

the complex questions I am asking is

about the relationship between our

locality and the bigger issue of how we

belong on the planet. Who can we trust

with our collective future?”

Akomfrah’s ambition is nothing

less than epic, the timespan of Purple

stretching from the industrial age

(images of factories, mills, machines

and mass employment ) to the digital

revolution and beyond (the possibilities

promised by biotech research, artifi cial

intelligence and genetics). The

looming threat of ecological disaster is

implicit throughout, most ominously

in the recurring appearance of lone,

white-coated, hooded fi gures who gaze

silently at landscapes threatened or

already blighted by human progress.

“The kind of work I make is

essentially time-based,” says Akomfrah ,

who is working on a new fi lm project

in New Orleans. “For that reason alone,

I felt I had to widen my focus to take

in the bigger narrative we are now all

caught up in. Once you become aware of

the implications of climate change for

future generations, it is almost as if you

have to respond. But I’m not a scientist

or a campaigner, I’m an artist. I’m

interested in the philosophy of climate

change rather than the hard science.”

Akomfrah describes Purple as “a

response to Anthropocene ”, the term

coined by scientists for the geological

age in which we are now living , a

period defi ned by the infl uence of

manmade activity on climate and

the environment. A major source of

inspiration for Purple is a book called

Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology

After the End of the World. Written by

Timothy Morton , an English academic,

it posits the idea that global warming

is the most dramatic illustration of a

“hyperobject” – an entity of such vast

temporal and spatial dimensions that it

baffl es our traditional ways of thinking

about it and, by extension, doing

something about it.

In a perhaps unconscious way,

Akomfrah’s overwhelming fi lm evokes

that very dilemma: our apparent

helplessness as individuals in the face

of rising sea levels and temperatures,

droughts and melting icecaps.

Against a stirring contemporary

classical soundtrack, his fi lm begins

by summoning up the momentum

of industrial England, a world of

mass production that signals – but is

utterly unlike – the hyper-reality of

contemporary globalism and digital

interconnectivity.

“I’m fascinated by the strange

interregnum that stretches from the

post-industrial to the digital present,”

Akomfrah explains. “Right now, as

I speak to you, I am looking at the

outlines of oil refi neries and sugar

factories on the horizon. They are still

there, still pumping out their poisons,

but they seem to belong to a diff erent

age. Their numbers have dwindled,

but they still have an impact on the

environment and they still speak of a

history of technology and exploitation.

They cast a long shadow.”

This notion of the past – and, in

J

ohn Akomfrah grew up in
the 1960s , in the shadow of
Battersea power station in
south London. As a child, he
remembers “feeling as if I
was enveloped in something
whenever I played on the
street. You could sense it in the air,
you felt it and saw it, whatever was
emanating from the huge chimneys.
We were being poisoned as we
played, but no one spoke about it. The
conversations in the pub tended to
be about football rather than carbon
monoxide poisoning .”
Fifty years on, the local has become
the global. Akomfrah’s latest art work,
Purple , is an immersive, six-channel
video installation that attempts to
evoke the incremental eff ects of
climate change on our planet. Shot
in 10 countries and drawing on
archive footage, spoken word and
music alongside often epic shots of
contemporary landscapes that have been
altered by global warming and rising
temperatures, Purple eschews a linear
narrative for an almost overwhelming
montage of imagery and sound.
Like all of Akomfrah’s work, it

particular, the colonial past – haunting

the present is another recurring theme

in Akomfrah’s work. It is there in the

raw, turbulent montage of images and

sound th at marked his debut fi lm,

Handsworth Songs , which he made in

1986 as part of the Black Audio Film

Collective. Its subject was the race

riots in London and Birmingham the

previous year and, in its blending

of archive footage, still photos and

newsreel, it set the tone for much

of what was to follow, creating a

formal signature known as bricolage,

the creation of a new work from the

layering and juxtaposition of various

existing sources.

Akomfrah, who is of Ghanaian

parentage, grew up in Britain and was

infl uenced by the late Stuart Hall ,

arguably this country’s most infl uential

black academic and cultural theorist.

Hall’s writings on memory, time and

identity in the wake of colonialism

inform Akomfrah’s earlier fi lms and he

‘Sensory overload’: a still from Purple, Akomfrah’s immersive, six-channel video

installation about global warming. © Smoking Dogs Films

remains an abiding, if not so obvious,

presence on Purple. “In a way, this is

a person of colour’s response to the

Anthropocene and climate change,

which is not just a white, European

fi xation, though it is often presented

that way. When I stand on a street in

Accra, I can feel that it is a city that

is literally at boiling point. It is way

hotter tha n it was in the 1960s or even

the 1980s. We need to start looking at

climate change in radically diff erent

ways, not just as part of a western-

based development narrative. It’s a

pan-African concern of great urgency,

but how long it will take people to see it

as such is a whole other problem.”

In 1989, Akomfrah had what he

calls “a major turning point”, when

he travelled to Alaska to make a

documentary for the BBC about

the Exxon Valdez oil spill and its

disastrous impact on the Alaskan

ecosystem. “The destruction of the

livelihoods of the Inuit community

immediately resounded with me

because it recalled the worst excesses

of colonial exploitation. It felt like I

was in a post-colonial space that was

very much haunted by the past.”

In 2015 , Akomfrah’s three-screen

fi lm installation, Vertigo Sea , marked

another turning point, a shift in tone

and scale that signalled the grand

ambition of Purple. In contrasting

the brutality of the whaling industry

‘A small

group of

men joined

me at the

table. Th ey

proceeded

to eat with

precision,

and quasi-

mechanical

effi ciency’

Meeting

Kraftwerk

Observer

Magazine,

page 33

‘When I stand on a

street in Accra, I can

feel it is at boiling

point, way hotter

than in the 1960s’