The Nine Muses uses Homer's Odyssey as a point of departure for its elegiac exploration of migration, exile, alienation and the definition of home. Built around images of Caribbean and African migrants in the 1950s and 60s, the film looks in part at the experience of those referred to as 'The Windrush Generation'. Combining tableaux of lone figures in frozen landscapes, dynamic 16mm archival footage and a layered sound collage of readings and music, Akomfrah's evocative allegory of immigration is as much a journey in itself as a document of journeys.

The almost lunar Arctic landscape stands as points of departure from which to layer a variety of temporal, psychological and physical realities. Simultaneously travelling forward in space and backward in time, Akomfrah deftly weaves archival fragments with readings from Dante Alighieri, Samuel Beckett, Emily Dickinson, James Joyce, John Milton, William Shakespeare, Sophocles, Dylan Thomas, Matsuo Basho, T.S. Eliot, Li Po, Rabindranth Tagore and the music of Arvo Pärt and India's Gundecha Brothers in his self described 'Proustian attempt to suggest the idea of migration'.

A project in collaboration with SCREEN Festival 2012
Loop
John Akomfrah 'The Nine Muses', 2010

Programme

Saturday 2 de June, at 6 pm

MACBA Public Programs
Tel. (+34) 93 481 46 81
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Exhibition