Peripeteia (Greek: περιπέτεια; a reversal of circumstances, or turning point) is a moving visualization of a black man and woman that appear in a 16th century drawing by the German Renaissance master Albrecht Dürer. John Akomfrah uses the film to give them movement and to imagine their lives and actions.

John Akomfrah’s work is so unique that it becomes almost impossible to fit his research into any classification system. His productions are in most cases disturbing apparitions, conveying the essence of a complex, unresolved situation. This is why we can talk about them in terms of a “complex encounter” (cfr. James Cliffort, 1988), like transferences through which to experience our own existence in a present made of memories, dreams, politics and everyday life. His artistic practice, ranging through art, television and cinema, is in fact influenced by personal meditation on memory, forgetting, contamination between past and present. The artist has displayed this attitude in group experiences (the Black Audio Film Collective, active from 1982 to 1998, and Smoking Dogs Film) and in situations more closely linked to individual artistic production.

Akomfrah is one of the most sophisticated interpreters of the theme of the diaspora of African culture in Europe. His reasoning in this area reflects a particular interest in the construction of portrait-narratives, marked by a non-linear, incomplete plot of lines formed by the overlapping of chronologies, contexts and timeless narrative structures. Pictorial, literary and textual elements, archival documents, visual and sound footage generate a historical collage, each with their own linguistic economy. What emerges, though, are absences in the tale, missing or forgotten passages, lateral and marginal episodes, which almost unconsciously resurface from the past like ghosts, contaminating the present.

Peripeteia is a good example of all this. The word means “turning point,” and in line with the conceptual structure of the exhibition in which it was first shown – “Hauntologies” at the Carroll/Fletcher gallery in London in 2013 – it harks back to Derrida’s Spectres of Marx to think about the enigma of the forgetting of an event that resurfaces from the past and contaminates the present, influencing self-perception.

The work narrates the story of a man and a woman, whose inner life is evoked by the artist starting with the discovery of two black and white drawings by Albrecht Dürer, at the start of the video. Observed repeatedly as sources of psychological temperaments, Akomfrah relies on Head of a Negro Man from 1508 and Portrait of the Moorish Woman Katharina from 1520 for the start of his narrative. With a few essential strokes, Dürer – who at the beginning of the 1500s set off to make a series of portraits influenced by the physiognomic studies of Leonardo da Vinci – traced the profile of a black adult man and a young black woman, both with a suspended gaze, looking downward, and an expression that reflects disquiet, vulnerability, torment. Considered one of the first representations of persons of color in western figurative culture, these two figures and their stories have been otherwise “lost in the winds of history.” Akomfrah inserts the drawings in the video precisely as absence that returns from the past, to assembly a film storyboard.

In the video we see a man and a woman, whose facial features are similar to those of the portraits by Dürer, crossing a timeless landscape. They walk down unpaved roads, both in costume, the man with a cane and a blanket worn as a cape, the woman with a white bonnet framing her face. The scenes unfold in a suspended atmosphere. The two make their physical and psychological voyage in parallel, proceeding without meeting except in a single shot, almost at the end of the narration, where reality and image remind us of what Barthes wrote about the concept of “punctum,” meaning the evocative aspect of photography through which a relationship is established between image and perception. The landscape and the intense sounds emitted by nature reflect the moods of the characters: stormy skies, green meadows, muddy ground, runnels of water and roads paved by stones most to the pace of the cries of animals, the whistling of the wind, the sounds of rushing water and the steps of human beings on the earth. Akomfrah analyzes the man, the woman and nature with the same attitude applied by Dürer to the drawing of clods of earth and rabbits: he does not include too much detail, but achieves that degree of magical realism that still makes Dürer a contemporary artist today.

Visual sources from different contexts then burst onto the stage, in discursive form. The camera abandons the face of the young woman and lingers over certain pictorial details taken from the central panel and the so-called “musical hell” of Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. Akomfrah chooses to extrapolate from the confusion of the characters depicted in the mysterious late-15th-century masterpiece, indicating white men and women and persons of color flirting near a spring, or grotesque part-human, part-animal figures. The reasons for their insertion inside Peripeteia do not seem to be based, however, on the symbolic aspects of Bosch's painting. Akomfrah seems to favor the idea of a multiethnic utopian paradise, and above all he seems to be interested in the figurative and psychological energy of these images, used as raw materials to freely recombine. Along with the paintings of Bosch and the drawings of Dürer, the turning point inPeripeteia is provided by the insertion of archival photographs in black and white, again showing scenes of the everyday life of men and women who surface from an unspecified past, which might also be the setting for the story of the two protagonists.

As the narrative gradually progresses, the question of the mysterious identity of the two figures definitively loses its interest, and the universal dimension of the tale takes over, of human torment, defeat, of past memory that generates knowledge of the present. But the video reveals nothing: what keeps us glued to the screen is the promise that something has to happen. And there will be no moment of truth. Towards the end, the sounds of nature are overlapped by a romantic Lied, which seems to function like an off-screen narrative voice.

Credits

Man: Trevor Mathison
Katharina: Monique Cunningham
Writing/Direction: John Akomfrah
Producers: Lina Gopaul, David Lawson
Photography: Dewald Aukema
Photography Assistant: Alex Seery
Costume: Jackie Vernon
Editor: Nse Asuquo
Mixer: Robin Fellows
Digital Grade: Dado Valentic
Digital Supervisor: Alex Seery
Scanning: Daniel Johnson-Mathison
Photographic Compositor: Catriona McAvoy
Online Assistant: Alan Raad
Post Production: Mytherapy, Savannah Audio, Smoking Dogs Films
Photographs: with the kind permission of Royal Museum for Central Africa

Smoking Dogs Films Production, in association with Carroll/Fletcher, London and the European Cultural Foundation