ROUTES, NOT ROOTS. JOHN AKOMFRAH, STUART HALL, AND THE BLACK AUDIO FILM COLLECTIVE

John Akomfrah’s film “The Unfinished Conversation” (2012), which is on show in the exhibition JOHN AKOMFRAH. A SPACE OF EMPATHY in the SCHIRN, is a tribute to Jamaican-born sociologist and cultural theorist Stuart Hall (1932-2014). The three-channel video installation consists largely of archive recordings of Hall’s radio and television appearances on the BBC. In the video, Hall talks about his memories of his country of origin, Jamaica, back then still a British colony, and his arrival in the United Kingdom in the 1950s as a member of the Windrush generation, which comprises people who migrated from the Commonwealth states between 1948 and 1971. The name is taken from the eponymous ship that brought the first immigrants from the Caribbean across the Atlantic. He also discusses his time at Oxford University and his later role as one of the founding figures of cultural studies in Britain. At one point in the film Hall remarks: “When I ask anyone where they´re from I expect nowadays to be told an extremely long story” and thus summarizes the essence of the Black Diaspora experience, as it existed particularly in the United Kingdom but also in other European countries: For example, making this reality of life more differentiated has also been a central concern for Black people in Germany since the 1980s.

Just like John Akomfrah, Stuart Hall addressed questions of identity throughout his life and did so in a way that still helps us navigate the complex issues of origin, belonging, and race today. In his autobiography “Familiar Stranger. A Life Between Two Islands,” he writes: “We tend to think of identity as taking us back to our roots, the part of us which remains essentially the same across time. In fact, identity is always a never-completed process of becoming – a process of shifting identifications, rather than a singular, complete, finished state of being.” For Hall, Caribbean culture is a blueprint for a hybrid society in which everyone comes from somewhere else. He describes his own family backgrounds as an amalgam of African, Jamaican, Scottish, and Portuguese-Jewish influences. His experiences of living in and between several worlds would lead Hall to the realization of how culture works in general: not as a stable, linear, progressive development eternally linked to purported origins but as a sequence of movements, diasporic ruptures, shifts and adaptations. ‘Routes, not roots’ – paths along which culture has always moved, constantly reconfiguring itself without apparent roots to which it could return.

HISTORY IS NOW

In an inter­view with Julia Grosse, the curator of the Frank­furt exhi­bi­tion, Akom­frah empha­sizes the inti­mate connec­tion that already existed between himself and Stuart Hall: “He was one of the few people to have seen the first rough version of ‚Handsworth Songs‘. We invited him to look at them and then to discuss them with us because Stuart was an impor­tant figure in the life of many Black Britons at the time.” Together they worked on decon­structing colo­nial and post-colo­nial narra­tives and on a new under­standing of Black dias­poric iden­tity. The formal aspects that would later become funda­mental to Akom­frah’s work are already evident in the group’s early output: an affir­ma­tive, yet crit­ical approach to archives, the decon­struc­tion of sound­tracks, and an insis­tence on multiple perspec­tives and a discur­sive focus. In Akom­frah’s expan­sive multi-channel projec­tions it is these elements that subse­quently become the defining factor for their intel­lec­tual and sensory inten­sity. The open-ended­ness of the narra­tives enables the audi­ence to partic­i­pate in a conver­sa­tion that is capable of funda­men­tally altering the way we look at both ourselves and others.