Venice Biennale Special: John Akomfrah
Dale Berning Sawa reviews John Akomfrah's British Council commission 'Listening All Night To The Rain'
Even before I knew anything of John Akomfrah's British Council commission at the 2024 Venice Biennale, I loved it for its title: Listening All Night To The Rain. When I was born, my parents were renting a flat on a farm in northern South Africa. People working on the farm called me Pula, which means "rain" in Sesotho, because they said I'd made my parents as happy as rain in a dry place makes everyone. Of course waking up to the sound of it falling on the roof above my head feels as comforting as home.
But home isn't a comfort for everyone. Nor is every listener to rainfall doing so from under a roof.
Embarking on the audiovisual journey Akomfrah has plotted throughout the British Pavilion — from its façade through to the back entrance with its view of the Venetian lagoon and the Adriatic beyond — is like pushing upstream through floodwaters. From the outset you're asking, but who is listening? Who is it raining on, and what will that much rain bring to them? Are they safe? Do they have shelter? Have they long not had water? Or does this shower presage a storm?
Akomfrah's work is a sequence of eight installations fashioned as song movements. Each canto, as he has labelled them, is a multi-screen or multi-sound-source moment in itself. I started trying to count how many screens there were, just to be able to give readers far away an idea of the overwhelm you feel, but that quickly proved impossible.
Canto I is a minimal set of six screens in columns of two, inserted into the façade at the top of the steps. Canto II populates the entire basement with pairs of smaller screens everywhere you look. Canto III, meanwhile, is a cloud of sound sources that fills the space above your head — reel-to-reel tape recorders, boomboxes, headphones, speakers, gramophones, vinyl records, dubplates, CD players, CDs, unspooled tape, blinking circuit boards, all wired up and variously buzzing, playing or broadcasting.
And so the piece continues, as indomitable as a storm surge, and depicting just that. Waters metaphorical and meteorological rise, endlessly.
Akomfrah takes his title from Poem 83, by the 11th century Chinese poet, Su Dongpo:
I'm like a little boat / sensing an expanse / of endless water // here under groves of trees / face to face in the bedroom / listening all night to the rain.
As Dongpo suggests, and as is consistent throughout Akomfrah's work, beauty here is inextricable from its opposite. The piece meshes newly filmed footage and soundscapes with archival materials to make urgent connections between colonialism and climate justice. The people most at risk from changing weather are in the countries still reeling from the extractive and oppressive forces European imperialism wielded.
In the filmed tableaux, you see lone figures at sea or on the shore. Some are on the deck of a large ferry, others are sat on a smaller boat, legs stretched out, faces invisible. Sometimes they turn their backs to the viewer, knee-deep in water. Sometimes they've turned to look you straight in the eye, from the depths of a landscape in trouble.
The found documentary footage and stills Akomfrah has used are expansive in scope. The arrival of HMT Empire Windrush in 1948 and the exposure, in 2018, of the Windrush scandal, effectively bracket the timeline Listening to the Rain follows. Significant moments in the intervening 70 years that the work references include riots and protests in 1980s England, war and internal displacement in 1970s Bangladesh, American conservationist Rachel Carson's iconic 1960s writings, the Mau Mau uprisings against British rule in 1950s Kenya, the institution of apartheid in 1940s South Africa. Time flows back and forth, in a flood of human and man-made catastrophes.
The thing about water is that once it stills, some things rise to the surface and others are lost forever. Ask anyone what has stayed with them from this onslaught of images and you'll probably get a different answer each time. The cantos segue from the Belgian crown's brutal domination of the Congo and the subsequent assassination of Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba in 1961 to America's bombing of Vietnam's forests to the drowning of British-Nigerian David Oluwale in 1969 following his abuse at the hands of police in Leeds. I can't stop re-seeing a pair of bird wings, white and bloody, floating in water. A mother seal painfully chasing after a hunter on the ice, who drags behind him a baby seal on a hook. Apartheid-era signs that read "Blanke Dame" (white women) and "We serve whites only". A black woman tied to a tree.
Throughout it all, the rain keeps falling. Once you've reached Canto VIII, what you feel most is that the rain didn't just start now. It's been pouring for centuries.
Akomfrah reprises his long-standing motif of a printed photograph —usually an archival portrait —lying in a stream. You can feel his cinematographical pleasure at the way the flowing waters refract the light and disturb or highlight the image. This speaks to our endless grappling with history and how it is written, the way its truths and meanings can be so difficult to hold in your hand and to process. If I had one criticism of the work, it would be that the cinematic treatment of this idea — the way these images actually look — is a bit too lush, the newly filmed footage a bit too beautiful. I found myself looking for sharper edges, something more raw, a bolder austerity that would say, all the more bluntly, "Here, look, this is about you too."
When you take a photograph, you can easily crop out whatever you don't want to see. Sounds are much harder to excise. I'm standing in the pavilion when a storm breaks. On the screen in front of me, a person stands in the water, while outside — I can see it through the open door and the windows above it — the wind assails the trees and the lagoon's waves. Rain like that Akomfrah depicts pounds on the roof above my head. All I can think of is that Venice itself is sinking from rising sea levels and that these are the very waters in which so many people have died — 29,442, since 2014, according to the Missing Migrants Project — trying to reach European shores.
This makes the quote Akomfrah has used to anchor Canto III hit altogether harder. It is from American composer Pauline Oliveros. "Listen to everything," she says, "until it all belongs together and you are part of it."
Akomfrah often speaks about hidden presences, ghosts, the guests you've not invited. This work urges us to listen for their voices and, crucially, to feel involved.
The British Council commission Listening All Night To The Rain at the Venice Biennale 2024 is on now and runs until Sunday 24 November.