John Akomfrah, The Hyperobject, and The End of the World

   John Akomfrah’s aesthetic origins are rooted in his intimate study of Black music history, the invention of the drum projected against the future-desert plane of his early film Last Angel in History is a wonderful precursor to the muddied desert expanses that characterize Four Nocturnes. The data-thief has arrived in the present/future and is now depicting the effects of
extractive economies in context. The destruction of ecological history through impersonal agricultural and industrial churn is a central feature of the four allegories on interconnectivity, Four Nocturnes, Akromfrah assembles in this three channel video installation work.

Peering into the geologic dimensions of colonial sprawl, we begin to witness the futility of putting things back: insects, biomes, native species, all will become artifacts. (1) Artifacts require
context to be fully understood. It is easier to lose track of the destruction, or fail to notice until its runoff has piled at our banks.

At some point, one notices that our individual power to effect change is dwarfed by much, much larger entities: multinational corporations, invasive networks of trucks, planes, tankers, and Ubers distributing product by the thousands, entire militaries, voter blocs, international governing bodies, etc. These entities so vast they are almost impossible to point at all at once are what ecology philosopher Timothy Morton describes as hyperobjects. (2) Close friend to Akomfrah, Morton believes that “we are no longer able to think [of] history as exclusively
human” after hugely impactful events such as James Watt’s invention of the engine. (3) The hyperobject can appear as an accumulation, a piling on of droplets, plastics, or time. This
accumulation must have a result. Once a layer of soot has appeared in the ozone layer, or growing nuclear wells silently threaten our very material composition, the Anthropocene is no
longer accurate for describing our historical impact. The contact is no longer human to human; it expands to insect, to atmosphere, to genome.

To elephants! In Four Nocturnes Akomfrah presents a polyrhythmic elegy to those elephant in size and impact, for 50 minutes broken into four chapters (Air, Water, Fire, Earth) we are asked
to ruminate on the grief of surviving members of an endangered species. Whether we focus on a trunk extended in mourning or a single, blinking, tear-soaked eye, the camera is able to point
to an inner space within these beings that helps widen our emotional perception of the largest mammal walking earth and close the gap between who we understand as possessing the
interiority to mourn. (4)

Featured prominently throughout Four Nocturnes and popularized in the West as animals with
enduring memory; wise, bounding, regal, elephants make a great ironic device once we understand their treatment on this planet is nothing of the sort. Elephants illustrate/indicate a power/size deferential––a wide expanse between sentience and impact. They are huge beings. In order to kill an elephant you must separate it from its herd, easier if young, or shoot from afar to avoid the violence of their grief. Elephant culling has been proven to alter the behavior of their kin, distorting understandings of safety and home for generations. Akomfrah then inserts parallel elegies of central martyrs to neocolonialist exploits. A photo of Patrice Lumumba stares back at us from the branches of a single tree in an empty desert. We watch a family of elephants paw at a bleached skull.

In a more literal turn in the third chapter, Akomfrah removes the elephant head and places it on human bodies. Through elephant-shaped masks, eyes become vast caverns molded by plastic,
there are no tears, we cannot see through holes that receive no light. Walking through desert and staring back at us once again, alive but faceless, eternally displaced and on-screen, the
migrant-actors in Four Nocturnes work to close the gap between metaphor and reality.

In his book Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After The End of the World, Timothy Morton describes the post-modern human’s inability to escape ironic gap: “Irony has become the feeling
of waking up inside a hyperobject, against which we are always in the wrong”. (5) Both Akomfrah and Morton have described late modernity as defined by things we all ‘already know.’ This
circumstance brings about defensive and omissive coatings, we either ignore the lack of snow or it’s all we talk about, either way a decision is made on how to exist with the common
knowledge of incoming destruction. Such decisions are what thread Akomfrah’s Four Nocturnes tightly together.

There is no cynical distance from which to enjoy this work.

 

Bibliography

1. Raengo, Alessandra. “The Jurisgenerativity of a Liquid Praxis.” Liquid Blackness 5, no. 1 (April
   1, 2021): 127–48. https://doi.org/10.1215/26923874-8932645.
2. Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. University of
   Minnesota Press, 2013. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctt4cggm7.
3. Ibid.
4. Yusoff, Kathryn. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Forerunners Ideas First from the
   University of Minnesota Press. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2018.
5. Morton, Hyperobjects.