Close-Up: John Akomfrah and the Black Audio Film Collective Becoming Black Audio: An Interview with John Akomfrah and Trevor Mathison

• Published in: Black camera : the newsletter of the Black Film Center/Archives 2015-04, Vol.6 (2), p.79-272
• Main Author: Mercer, Kobena
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Address forms; Art galleries & museums; Artist collectives; Bookstores; Culture; Discussion groups; Mixed media; Political activism; Students; Visual artists
• ISSN: 1536-3155; 1947-4237

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. [...]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. [...]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.