Becoming Black Audio: An Interview with John Akomfrah and Trevor Mathison
- Becoming Black Audio:An Interview with John Akomfrah and Trevor Mathison
Addressing the conditions surrounding the formation of Black Audio Film Collective, this interview with John Akomfrah and Trevor Mathison shows how the specific circumstances that brought seven individuals together during undergraduate studies at Portsmouth Polytechnic, where the collective was constituted in 1982, cast a critical light on the cultural and political fault lines of late 1970s Britain. Revealing how members of the collective moved between disparate worlds of black activism and the aesthetic avant-garde, the interview highlights the critically innovative syntheses that Black Audio Film Collective achieved through acts of diasporic translation, which led to the hybrid practice of intercultural cinema. This new mode of filmmaking was anticipated in their first group production, a multimedia performance based on Aimé Césaire’s epic poem, “Notes of a Return to My Native Land” (1939–42). My interview was conducted June 19, 2013, in the London offices of Smoking Dogs Films, the independent production company established by John Akomfrah, Lina Gopaul, and David Lawson in 1998.
I would like to ask about the period circa 1976 to 1982. How did the group come together? What was the sequence of events that led to the formation of Black Audio Film Collective, and what had led each of you to Portsmouth Polytechnic, where you all met?
In a way I have to go to ’82 and then come back, because what’s fascinating for me was listening to one of the audio recordings from the First National Black Art Convention at Wolverhampton Polytechnic organized by members of the BLK Art Group. Marlene Smith played it recently at a symposium on The Unfinished Conversation [2012] at Nottingham New Art Exchange. On it you hear me say that I’m not an artist and that I don’t think we need the phrase, but that what I am committed to is collective [End Page 79] practice, and the concept of art as a practice in general. So when Paul Goodwin, former curator of Cross-Cultural Programmes at Tate Britain, commented, “Oh, but you said there you’re not an artist,” I had to emphasize to him that you’ve got to understand that just the very act of rejecting the category “artist” was a way of opening things out, which was a strategic necessity.
The 1982 conference was billed as the first event of its kind to discuss “the form, function and future of black art,” and it was clear that at that moment we were trying to get rid of a number of things but that we hadn’t quite decided what would replace it. One knew that you had inherited this “black art” language from the United States, which valorized a blues aesthetic or a jazz language, but in the British context we simply don’t have that here. As much as I respect such African American traditions, this was not the space for it, and, at the same time, it was also clear to me that the Shaka Dedi school of black art, the art of uplift that informed his Black Art Gallery in Finsbury Park, North London, wasn’t going to do the trick either. And if you were a black artist in this context, you certainly couldn’t go straight into the London art world because it certainly did not see you as a figure that was worth taking on anyway.
All these factors were something we were aware of from the get-go. I was very clearly aware of such dilemmas in the mid-1970s when I met Reece Auguiste, Lina Gopaul, and Avril Johnson. I only met Eddie George and Claire Joseph in 1980 when I got to Portsmouth, but before that we had the basis of the academic side of Black Audio, as it were, because three of us were at the same further education college together.
Where was that?
Lina, Reece, and I had met in 1977 in City and East London College in Whitechapel. My mother taught at City and East London College and I’d been expelled from South Thames College in...
