Vertigo Sea

John Akomfrah’s three-channel video installation Vertigo Sea (2015) is a reflection on man’s relationship with the sea. Weaving together multiple narratives that portray the ocean as a protagonist, where histories around global migration, the refugee crisis, and the transatlantic slave trade, alongside ecological concerns, come together. The installation juxtaposes violent scenes of a whale hunt off the shores of Newfoundland, polar bear hunting on Arctic ice flows, migrants bound to Europe drowned at sea and their bodies washed ashore, images of slave ships, the sea as a test site for nuclear bombs as well as a field for deep-water oil drilling. Here the sea is a cemetery: it holds memories of beauty as well as violent scenes of industrial exploitation, climate change and the mass death of migrants and enslaved people. Akomfrah tells the incredible story of Olaudah Equiano (about 1745–1797), a freed slave from the Kingdom of Benin, who became a British abolitionist, sea merchant and Arctic explorer.
Shot on the Isle of Skye, the Faroe Islands and the Northern regions of Norway, with the BBC’s Bristol-based Natural History Unit, Vertigo Sea directly references the seascapes of J.M.W. Turner, Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa (1818–1819) and the landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich. Texts from Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931) and Heathcote Williams’ poem Whale Nation (1988) function as intertitles.