The London-based, British Ghanaian artist and filmmaker Larry Achiampong explores race, class, and history in a multidisciplinary practice that, as described in the biography on his website, seeks to “examine his communal and personal heritage—in particular, the intersection between pop culture and the postcolonial position.” First devised in 2016, partially as a response to the sociopolitical shock of Brexit, Achiampong’s Relic Traveller is an ambitious project that has manifested as performance, sound installation, moving image, prose, and a remarkable public commission in which Achiampong reimagined London Underground’s iconic roundel in Pan-African colors—green, black, and red—that spoke symbolically to various African diasporic identities.
A central pillar of the project is a suite of four science fiction–inflected short films—Relic 0, Relic 1, Relic 2, and Relic 3—now streaming on the Criterion Channel. These hypnotic works, which run between ten and fourteen minutes, are set at an unspecified time in the future and chart the journeys of intrepid “Relic Travellers” across Britain and the world as they collect and process remnants and testimonies from the colonial past. Blending crisp images, poetic voice-over, and Achiampong’s own spare electronic music to create an atmospheric audiovisual experience, the Relic films simultaneously offer hopeful visions of a rising Africa and mournful laments for a harrowing past.
I recently caught up with Achiampong to discuss the origins of the project, its future, and his artistic inspirations.
Can you tell me about the origins of Relic Traveller?
In 2016, I was thinking about Brexit and the effects of these ideas that connected heavily with nationalism in a way that I found alarming. In conversations with friends, family, and peers, I was asking myself these questions more and more: What happens when a nation or a state embraces nationalism and cuts itself off from others around the planet, creating an individualized idea of survival? How does survival exist? How does that work? I was thinking about the larger framework of what Brexit meant at the time, and how it inspired other Western countries. Months after Brexit, Trump came to power. Those two things were connected, and I found them significant, as well as the rise of right-wing politics within Sweden, Germany, Poland, and France. At the same time, I’d been reading up on the African Union—a continental body consisting of the fifty-five member states that make up the African continent—and a passport program they’d been developing for years that would allow Africans to travel to other African states without the problem of a visa. You’re looking at one part of the world where borders are closing, and another part of the world where borders are opening.
Relic Traveller is set in a moment in the future where the global West is coming to a point of decline because of nationalism, while the African Union has come into prosperity, harmony, and independence. And it’s quite important that I say this: the project isn’t about a utopia. This point in time brings with it responsibility. During this shift, the African Union creates a range of initiatives, one of which is the Relic Travellers’ Alliance. Relic Travellers are people who are sent around the planet to pick up clues and, in particular, vocal testimonies from people who have been oppressed by the ghosts of colonization. These are stories and experiences of people who have not yet been allowed to be healed or learned from. These stories help to govern the future and create a space for healing, from a bottom-up rather than a top-down perspective. Within the films Relic 0 to Relic 3, visually, the viewer is traveling with a Relic Traveller—there are multiple—and taking in environments, mostly Western, that the traveler is apparating across. And then on an aural level, apart from the soundtrack and sound design, you are hearing the testimonies of people who have been oppressed. Also, in Relic 0 and 2 you’re specifically hearing the testimonies of an unnamed character whom I refer to as Mother, who is giving the Relic Traveller an update on things that have happened on the planet that have led to this moment.
Clearly, these films engage deeply with long, painful histories and would be resonant at any time. But in the past few years, particularly in the UK, there’s been a real resurgence of empire fetishism, and seemingly more reluctance than ever among the media and ruling classes to address the reality of this history. To what extent are the films a reaction to that context?
For me, the films represent a warning to the West about its negligence, ignorance, mythical approach to history, omission of the histories and legacies of empire, slavery and colonization, and how those things affect the way that we live today: the way that Black people are still disenfranchised. They’re a stark warning that the West will undo itself as a result of the lies it has celebrated, taught, and disseminated for a while. It’s almost as if it will eat itself unless an understanding of the truth—or what has not been allowed to be revealed as the truth—is opened up. Something like Brexit is only possible because the UK, the powers that be, and the media have propagated myths for so long regarding the idea of the “other,” the foreigner, and the so-called independence and strength of the United Kingdom or the West, without recognizing the resources and contributions [of colonized and oppressed people]—voluntary and otherwise—that make these nations so apparently great.
Who and what were some of your key inspirations for the Relic films?
I was inspired by practitioners in different fields, including film, art, and music: Ousmane Sembène, John Akomfrah and Smoking Dogs Films, Nnedi Okorafor, Hideo Kojima, Shigeru Miyamoto, Adrian Piper, John Carpenter, Ama Ata Aidoo, Nina Simone, Christy Azuma & Uppers International.
I’ve included these films in a series curated around the theme of Afrofuturism, which I’ve always seen as a helpful framework in which to organize and curate work, rather than a genre in and of itself. I’m interested to hear about your relationship with this word/theme, and about how it may have guided the Relic films.
When I was an undergrad, reading through books and journals, and finding out about the likes of John Akomfrah and films like The Last Angel of History, most certainly gave me a place to consider where I might take my thoughts, feelings, ideas, and stories—I hope that through my work I’m able to pay homage. Does the term Afrofuturism speak for or contain what I do? I’m not so sure. Has it inspired me? Absolutely. I have no problem with Afrofuturism being spoken of in connection to what I’ve done, but I think for Black artists it’s important that those of us who are building our ideas, words, and language create these things on our terms. Afrofuturism, as I know it, is a term coined by a white critic, Mark Dery, and at that point in time [1994] it was able to locate some ideas within a certain understanding. But even the word “futurism,” when attached to “Afro,” has a complicated history that is connected to fascism and racism. I have my own terminology for my work: “Sanko-Time.” It brings together two words. “Sankofa” is a Twi word from Ghana, meaning to go back and retrieve something that may have been lost or forgotten, or something that is known but needs to be revisited in order to make sense of the present or pave the way for the future. The future does not become possible without the past. The word “time” represents my interest in ideas of science fiction and time travel. It’s been important for me to try to create new ideas, meanings, and words that can breathe independently from other words and concepts that carry their own complications.
Can you talk about the films’ striking visual style and compositions and the focus on landscapes?
My visual style has been built through different personal interactions and inspirations over the years, but certainly not through art school, as I didn’t study filmmaking as a vocation. It came from watching many different genres of films, reading comic books, and playing video games, which I still do. The Legend of Zelda has had a big impact on the way that I think and make films—the way that the landscape is a character that changes over time. I think about the landscapes in my films as if they are characters, or people with personalities. These landscapes are places that used to have other kinds of lives, but now something just doesn’t quite seem right. I don’t tend to work with a storyboard, but I’m very interested in building a personal relationship with the sites I’m filming by visiting them as much as possible, spending some time away from them, and asking myself questions about how one might travel or capture that environment from a wide or a focused point of view. What are the details that make this the personality that builds this environment? That’s the approach that we took with the Relic Traveller films. Each film contains this idea of undertaking a journey: both the Traveller and myself, as a filmmaker, getting reacquainted with these places that I’ve happened on.
How are you deliberately looking to subvert clichéd on-screen representations of Africa and stories of migration?
I am interested in building stories that do not fit the usual, tested sci-fi format of the white male archetype who is going to save the planet. Over the years I’ve had conversations with friends or family members after we’ve come out of a film where we’ve detailed how, typically, African or Black characters are done a disservice. If we think about Blade Runner, for example, whiteness is front and center, and anything that is not whiteness simply becomes part of the periphery or the backdrop. For the Relic Traveller films, I was thinking about creating heroes who looked like myself—our heroes, who are African and Black, are exploring these mostly Western environments, where the West becomes exotic. It’s something I intend to open up further as my practice develops, and have experimented with previously in films like Sunday’s Best and The Expulsion. For me it’s about illuminating the types of experiences that haven’t been given breathing space before. And the multitudes of Relic Travellers that exist in the films are part of that process of creating different, complex narratives. Initially I wrote these characters for my son and daughter to play. My daughter at the time was way too young to put on a MiG pilot costume! But I wanted to build stories that they and others could believe in, or feel like they had a place or an active investment in.
I love the calm and controlled tone of the voice-overs in the films—they seem to contain so much resolve and fury and hope all at once. Can you talk about both developing the content of the script and getting the delivery of the words right?
The process of writing is probably the part that takes the longest for me. It becomes a space for emptying thoughts, feelings, and words, and a place of constructing new landscapes out of them, or breaking them down, only to rebuild. Along the way, I imagine voices that could work with the words. Most of the voices in my film are not those of people who are trained actors but of people I know or know of. Through doing multiple takes with the recording artists and allowing space, I’m able to build nuance. That process is quite long, but it’s necessary in order to capture the type of energy that you need when hearing and feeling a set of stories and experiences.
The score is mesmeric and so central to how the emotional power of these films builds up. Tell me about creating the music and soundscapes.
I never formally learned to create or produce sounds; it’s just something I’ve built an interest in, drawing upon various aspects of pop culture. I’ve been influenced by my uncle, a DJ who would play high-life music and mix it with Western hip-hop or R&B at a time when that was not being done. And I’m also influenced by having been around people who create garage and grime beats. I developed an interest in bedroom music production, which is quite similar to how I work now. I don’t have loads of equipment, but I have a couple of hardware synths, and I’ve used the Akai Music Production Center, a piece of technology responsible for incredible hip-hop and house sounds. I started working with samples from my parents’ record collection and have created a few beat tapes from that. But more and more in my filmmaking I’m entering the realm of just evolving sounds, and having jam sessions with myself. I won’t sit at the synthesizer and think “this sound needs to be heavy or dark”; I’ll create a series of riffs, build those stems, and layer on top of them—build on the energy. There’s an artistry to it, but I’m also interested in creating a cool kind of groove, so that whoever listens to it wants to maybe listen to it again, potentially outside the film. All of these things—the narrative, the structures of the visual and audible landscapes—conjure up their own set of spirits and characters that make an important piece of the larger pie. Sound is such a big deal to me.
How do you see yourself building on the Relic Traveller project?
I’ve created a film that connects with the main quadrilogy, called Reliquary 2, which was commissioned by John Hansard Gallery and released online last year. It utilizes film footage from my own archive as well as new animation, and illustrations by Wumi “Wumzum” Olaosebikan, who has worked with me on creating the vectors on the Pan-African flags. What’s different this time is that the voice-over—the vocal testimony—is my own. It’s set during the pandemic, and it’s something of a letter to my children, talking about my hopes, my concerns and fears about the future and their place in it, and how the world—in particular the Western world—has viewed and may continue to treat them. It’s in a similar vein as Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, which he wrote for and to his son.
Outside of that, I’m working on other projects that are not within the realm of Relic Traveller. I definitely wouldn’t say never in terms of revisiting it, but for now I’m excited about some new ideas. What’s great about the project is that it can be revisited. It’s very open-ended.
