John Akomfrah’s immersive and visual works consider migration and diasporic communities through the media of film. Now, in new work for the Venice Biennale, commissioned and managed by the British Council, Akomfrah is dissecting a historical narrative through an auditory lens, putting sound at the centre of his new piece, Listening All Night To The Rain.
‘I’d got to a point where I thought a lot of what I want to say involves trying to pull people into positions of listening,’ he says. ‘It’s about acknowledging connections with other species, and each other. We’re cautioned to listen to rising water levels, CO2 emissions – there are a lot of voices begging to be listened to. It felt like a good moment to just bring up some of the past. [The work] is both looking ahead to the things that we are definitely interested in the present, but a lot of it is also to do with the immediate past and the things we haven’t really paid attention to, [and] sometimes they are related. There’s much to hear.’
