Toxic Cloud: A Passageway Toward Collective Thinking
Toxic Cloud acts as an extended entryway or a rite of passage that John Akomfrah insists on before seeing the film. Today, I’d like to focus our conversation on why Akomfrah sets this precursor and how moving through Toxic Cloud changes the experience of then seeing the film. To explore this, I want to invite you to think back to the last time you saw a movie at a theatre. The experience leading up to the film is immersive and specifically organized. Often, you enter a dark room, walk up a narrow pathway or ramp towards the screen, find your seat and wait for the lights to dim before the movie begins. This architectural set up is functional, providing the proper light and sound environment for the film, but it also reorients your attention to focus on the movie. Toxic Cloud similarly dictates your time and attention. By directing guests to first enter through the Toxic Cloud before seeing the Four Nocturnes, moving through the sculpture slows down the pace of the viewer. In this way, Akomfrah works with time materially to capture our attention and direct us toward new ways of thinking by encouraging slower reflection. Therefore, Toxic Cloud acts as a framing device highlight the connections between the challenging ideas in Akomfrah’s films such as environmental collapse, the afterlife of objects, environmental racism, genocide and human impact on the planet.
Let’s begin by taking note of our surroundings. The room has been fully enveloped in a dark shade of purple. The color Akomfrah chose for this installation recalls the traditional Ghanaian symbol for mourning. It also refers to the installation’s original companion film entitled, Purple. Within this purple void 1,000 plastic jugs are suspended on a web of metal cables, creating a looming ‘cloud’ of polluted air. Akomfrah guides us through this transitory space with a pathway of light towards the sounds of his nearby video playing. The conglomerate of oil jugs have varying shades of yellow, possibly showing signs of age and within them there are painterly streaks of an oily residue. There appear to be groupings of color within the cloud, ranging from white to an oil-stained ochre color, that feel like Impressionist brush strokes. This coloring creates a glow of dappled light that feels cautionary like the eerie warmth of a sunny winter’s day in a world altered by climate change. The organic, billowing forms made by the plastic oil jugs hover low for close inspection. This debris becomes abstracted through repetition. The handles and spouts tessellate across the surface of the sculpture making a loose pattern of dashes and o’s.
John Akomfrah refers to Toxic Cloud as being composed of ’oil jugs’ but he does not specify what kind of oil these containers once held. It may have been some type of gasoline or it could refer to palm oil. Palm oil comes from trees that are native to Africa and our reliance on it in processed foods, animal feed and biofuel has been the leading cause of deforestation in the region.
Another thing to note when looking at Toxic Cloud is the scale. John Akomfrah’s work is conceptually invested in trying to make visual representations of things that are overwhelming and difficult to summarize. Often referring to Timothy Morton’s theory of the ‘hyperobject’,a term coined for something that is so large it’s hard to apprehend, Akomfrah works to capture the enormity of plastic pollution by drastically emphasizing scale in Toxic Cloud. (1) The entire ceiling is transformed with this encroaching cloud that, at points, comes down so low you could reach up and touch it. The form creates a feeling of overwhelm. According to data from Reuters, approximately 481.6 billion plastic bottles are used worldwide every year, which translates to roughly 1 million plastic bottles being used every minute. (2) The reality that plastic cannot decompose and will be on our planet indefinitely is difficult to truly grasp. Especially when so much of our plastic use is invisible to us. We quickly dispose of plastic items and then they seem to disappear. When of course, in reality they do not and will be on our planet long after we are gone. In this way, plastic pollution is a hyperobject. Toxic Cloud contends with the immensity of these circumstances by giving us a snapshot of our current self destruction in this installation. The scale of Toxic Cloud implicates the viewer directly because it miniaturized you in comparison to the staggering sculpture overhead. This confrontation makes the climate crisis feel pertinent.
However, John Akomfrah does not engage with climate change on a merely conceptual level in his works. This artwork speaks to the climate crisis on a global scale but it is deeply rooted in a personal reflection of the artist’s upbringing. Growing up near a coal-fired power station in London, Akomfrah remarks on how the pollution that leaked into his neighborhood had a direct impact on the wellbeing of the people in the area. In an interview at the Hirshhorn Museum with associate curator Marina Isgro and African Art senior curator Karen Milbourne, Akomfrah notes that when he was growing up in the 60s and 70s the connection between the polluted neighborhoods and the agitated behavior in the youth living there and breathing these toxins was not recognized. He says, ”The two things were completely understood as being mutually exclusive…and so Purple is about trying to make these connections that were not apparent as I lived through it.” (3) Exposure to air, ground and water pollution has been reported to cause respiratory issues such as asthma, as well as lead poisoning, cancer and cardiovascular disease among other things. Low-income communities of color are disproportionately exposed to these environmental hazards. Chicago, in particular, struggles with an entrenched history of environmental racism. The discriminatory, racist housing practices that constructed the majority of Chicago’s neighborhoods in the 1920s pushed communities of color to the South and West sides of the city. Forcing schools, playgrounds, grocery stores and homes to be in close proximity with commercial zones that emit industrial waste. This is a human health crisis.
If we take a single oil jug, for example and imagine how it got to be here, hanging above our heads, we can see how many people, animals and plants were impacted by its production. First, crude oil was extracted from the ground and turned into plastic, disrupting the surrounding plant life and animal habitats in the area. Then, people worked to design and produce the plastic jug in a factory, filled it with oil that was also harvested from the ground, transported and distributed it across oceans before it could be sold for the first time. As we saw during the pandemic lockdowns, when these fragile production chains are broken it quickly becomes impossible to receive goods at our usual rate. Within the lifespan of a single oil jug, we can start to see a web of interconnectedness. Toxic Cloud guides us towards seeking connections between seemingly disparate themes.
Oftentimes, the subject of environmental collapse, human rights violations, animal extinctions, wars, housing crises, moments of historical and present day violence, are seen as separate entities with their own sets of challenges to overcome. John Akomfrah’s work is invested in unearthing the connections between these conflicts, without oversimplifying their nuances. By refusing to isolate these supposedly disparate issues Akomfrah demonstrates the link between all life on our planet. He emphasizes how the past, whether a childhood memory or a historical moment, constructs our current circumstances and therefore an awareness of it is crucial to imagining our future. Perhaps, in acknowledging the interrelationships between racism, war, colonialism and genocide, we can find new strategies to combat them. Artworks like Toxic Cloud guide us toward reflecting on our individual and shared influence on the planet. Akomfrah’s work suggests that if we adapt our perspectives to think collectively it may be easier to shift our cultural values towards remediation and collaboration.
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