In geological time – Proterozoic, Jurassic, Holocene etc. – some people reckon we’re living in the Anthropocene: an epoch defined by humanity’s impact on the world. Basically, we’ve messed everything up so badly that scientists are giving our idiocy a name. British artist John Akomfrah is seriously freaked out about the Anthropocene, and his six-screen installation in the Barbican’s Curve gallery lays bare all of humanity’s fears about the impending doom of our planet.
Skipping past a stack of tyres, a chandelier made of water cans and some very questionable photographs, ‘Purple’ takes up a big chunk of the end of the Curve. It’s a near-wordless work of speculative fiction, weaving together archive imagery, HD footage and mega-emotive music. Akomfrah gently mashes together images of burbling streams, violent weather, belching factories and environmental destruction with prosaic visions of ’50s British life. Recurring figures in white hooded coats stand in gorgeous wild vistas. A couple of people in scuba gear work out on exercise bikes on a yacht (no idea). Babies are born, men work down the mines, companies bid for oil-rich tracts of land.
You get it. Humans have spent centuries trying to screw up the earth and this is how it looks. It tugs at the heartstrings. The death and destruction here is painted as both global and local, in your bed as your loved ones die of the black lung, and out in the real world as nature coughs its own last. It’s immersive and heady, a sort of vanitas of a planet: a portrait of life’s follies and the inevitability of time passing.
But the point’s a bit obvious, and it can be frustrating being preached to when you’re in the choir, especially when Akomfrah isn’t offering any solutions or new comments. He’s just presenting all these horrifying visions of humanity’s impact on the planet. But maybe that’s the point. Maybe Akomfrah is just overwhelmed, helpless and shocked in the face of our idiocy, standing slack-jawed under the Anthropocene’s wave of effluent. Maybe this is the only way he can start to make sense of it all.
@eddyfrankel
