Vertigo Sea
Vertigo Sea (2015) by John Akomfrah is a 48-minute immersive three-channel video installation. It is a meditation on man’s relationship to the sea and explores issues including the history of slavery, migration, conflict, and ecological concerns such as whale and polar bear hunting and nuclear testing. It combines original footage with archival material primarily drawn from the BBC Natural History Unit.
Footage is arranged in a split screen triptych with epic images that sweep past in contrasting scales, speeds and slownesses. Macrocosmic views appear microscopic in a hallucinatory scaling effect. Thunderstorms, atomic bomb explosions, whale hunts, seaweed forests, vast animal migrations, slave ships, blooms of algea, feeding frenzies, infernos of smoke from burning oil platforms, sinking migrant ships interwoven with testimony and fragments of texts from Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931) and Heathcote Williams’ poem Whale Nation (1988). Akomfram orchestrates a montage that immerses us into the liquid medium of history and storytelling. Its sweeping scale, like the sea, is sublime.
We are subsumed in the sublime in Vertigo Sea. The sea is timeless. It is a force of nature. It can be calm and serene one moment and then unleash violent storms and waves the next. It is dangerous. It is powerful. Its transcendent vastness stretches beyond the horizon, evoking feelings of awe and wonder when confronted with its sheer size. It is teeming with life, yet much of it remains unexplored and mysterious. Dangerous, powerful, mysterious, awesome all are hallmarks of the sublime. We recognize images of drowning migrants and the butchery of whales. They invoke a profound emotional response of terror and horror and our part in it. Juxtaposing the beauty of the setting with the terror of the events taking place within it, this blending of the two concepts creates a unique and unsettling emotional experience for the audience. This is a sublime work exploring the complex and transcendent aspects of human experience. We are swept into the sea as we are into history, bound to its violence, annihilated by its beauty.
