The arrival of Christopher Columbus and the conquistadors in the Americas led to the destruction of empires and civilisations and the deaths of millions in the new world – not by war, but from the waves of diseases that travelled from the old world to the new. Human contact took smallpox, plague, typhus and measles to the new world and brought syphilis to the old. It also led to the traffic of plants and animals, precious metals, populations, commodities and ideas from one side of the world to the other. The effects of exploration and conquest, migration and colonisation, in what has come to be called The Columbian Exchange, are too many to catalogue. It changed everything and is certainly too much to unpack here, on a gallery wall-panel or even in a 50-minute film by John Akomfrah, whose hugely ambitious art always gives the effect of running away with itself. Arcadia, presented on five screens butted together in the form of a cross, glosses a history of these fateful transactions and consequences in a constantly unfolding series of vignettes, choreographed tableaux and montaged footage culled from many sources. Keeping up is hard to do.
On 16 September, 1620, after many delays, the Mayflower, with its 102 pilgrim passengers, set sail from Plymouth for America, landing on Cape Cod in early November. For the 400th anniversary of this journey, Akomfrah – who is set to represent Great Britain at next year’s Venice Biennale – was invited to make a film, originally scheduled to be premiered at the opening of The Box, the newly remodelled and rebranded Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery. Having shot a great deal of material, the Covid pandemic stalled everything, eventually leading to a three-year delay, and a change in the film’s direction. For Akomfrah, one pandemic led to another. It is estimated that up to 95% of the inhabitants of the new world died from disease following first contact with the conquistadors. Ninety per cent of the native inhabitants of Massachusetts Bay had died in a wave of smallpox not many months before the arrival of the Mayflower, which was why the pilgrims found cleared lands and cornfields devoid of people when they arrived. Nor will you meet any of those pilgrims, lately arrived from Plymouth, in Akomfrah’s Arcadia. No corn-ears, no turkeys.
But there is always a man on the shore, his back to us, looking out to sea. And groups of people standing about and giving each other significant looks, or trudging the beach with buckets or carrying big minimalist crosses. Some wear T-shirts and trainers, finding themselves among a collection of beached grandfather clocks and a wind-up gramophone. A caption says that this is Santo Domingo 1493, but it is hard to tell. Some wander in from the costume department dressed as conquistadors in their helmets and breastplates. The tide is coming in, or going out, and the sun is either about to rise or has just dropped below the horizon. Look at this scene and you’ll miss what’s happening on the other four screens. Here come the flying fish, the frolicking seals and the dolphin sliding beneath the prow of the sailing ship as its prow cleaves the waves. Here come the toadstools and the stop-action slime-mould jerkily covering the rock. Here come Akomfrah’s tropes, familiar from earlier films by the artist. Joining the big clocks, abandoned furniture litters the beaches and wastelands. Now we are in a woodland (Yucatan Peninsula 1518, the caption reads) fly-tipped with ecclesiastical brassware and a bedstead and mattress sitting in the ferns, vestments and other bits of clothing hanging from the trees. As soon as you grab an image, another cries for attention. We go from macrocosm to microcosm, from the nature documentary to the theatrical.
With its arid vistas and undersea life, with its weather systems seen from space, the mangroves and the storm-thrashed coast, the National Geographic views of Monument Valley and the sped-up loading and unloading in the computerised container port, Arcadia is mesmerising to look at. But then Akomfrah’s work is always beautifully staged, shot, montaged and arranged. The John Dory hung from its hook, the basket of walnuts, the eye of the hurricane, the minuscule invertebrates dancing in the water column and a whale passing by: everything we see is somehow equalised. Everywhere you look, something ravishing, or quite possibly horrible, is happening. A rocky coastline is littered with skeletons and strewn with bits of clothing, and what looks to me like an inflatable crocodile. I imagine Akomfrah’s film crew carting all this stuff around with them and arranging it all on the rocks. Brief captions thrown on the screens signpost times and places where smallpox struck: Central Peru 1533, Southeast Brazil 1563, Argentine Northwest 1599, Colony of Virginia 1619, New Plymouth 1619, North Japan 1714, they say. But there really is too much going on to concentrate, especially as you are having to negotiate so much simultaneous material: the spectacular views, the meandering rivers, the mangroves and the miasmas, the plumes of sediment curdling the sea, the childish soap bubbles caught in the wind and the swarms of yellow lights flickering in the woods.
While all this is going on, we hear snatches of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s 1865 opera L’Africaine, and listen to readings from John Milton’s 1667 Paradise Lost, read by Anton Lesser, and ancient Greek writer Artemidorus’s 2nd century AD The Interpretation of Dreams, read by David Timson. Both readings, taken from audio book recordings, add to a sense of momentous portent and gravity. The flaring auroras, the full moon, a swing and a slide on an empty beach all take on doomy significance. Towards the end the entire world heaves into view across all the screens. We fly over a big hut in a jungle, the inhabitants just visible between the trees. They might be waving goodbye. Zooming in, jungles and plains become a continuous patchwork of intensive farming and industry. The surface of the planet has the look of the inside gubbins of a computer. As the planet revolves, sprawling cities are spangled in the night, islands light up and are gone.
• John Akomfrah: Arcadia is at the Box, Plymouth, until 2 June
