Baff Akoto’s moving-image artwork uses dance, music and poetry to explore spiritual connections across Africa’s diaspora
Baff Akoto’s moving-image artwork, Leave The Edges is an immersive dreamscape that explores Africa’s diverse diasporic identities through dance, poetry and music. Selected for BFI London Film Festival, this work took the artist through Europe and the Caribbean to consider both the historical legacies felt by Black people around the world and current societal debates writ large by the Black Lives Matter movement. But rather than rely on formal narrative, the film turns to the language of movement to gently draw on the silver threads connecting the diaspora across ancestries, borders and cultures.
Leave The Edges features British-Ghanaian flamenca Yinka Esi Graves and the Guadeloupean spiritual researcher Yane Mareine as well as a freeform poem by Nigerian-German poet Jumoke Adeyanju and a score by British-Ugandan recording artist Alfa Mist. Fusing choreographed scenes and lilting texts with footage from beaches at dawn and carnivals by night, the results feel intimate yet expansive, speaking to joy and to struggle, and capturing moments of ritual steeped in unspeakable beauty.
Akoto was raised between London and Accra and found early acclaim for 2010’s Football Fables followed by projects for Channel 4 and BBC. He’s since developed his practice of "biomechanic anthropology" and is currently investigating VR filmmaking including Virtual (Black) Reality Volume 2, which is also showing at London Film Festival. Here we talk to Akoto about the passions that have fuelled Leave The Edges.
Please tell us about the process of making the film and what your collaborators brought to the work?
The process was primarily informed by conversations I was having, and still have, with friends and colleagues from the diaspora. There are a lot of us that exist between different places and recognise multiple homes. That’s what I wanted to put on film - this continual conversation about what it means to exist in these spaces as a diasporic African - and this genesis naturally took us around Europe and beyond.
The fact that we were looking at different types of cultural practice really got us into this non-verbal space. Yane Mareine and [artist] Julien Béramis in Guadeloupe were exploring their spiritual roots and what it meant to come from that there and simultaneously be a European citizen, because Guadeloupe is still evolving through modern colonialism. To be a Black person from Guadeloupe and a descendent from the West African Igbo people has a specific resonance. It’s something I don’t have any personal experience of but it still felt familiar to me. It’s that wrestling with history in the here and now.
What do you hope viewers will come away with from experiencing the film?
I hope people feel like they’ve been to another place. This isn’t a wordy film, there’s no script per se, but the intention was to make something that speaks to people on an emotional level. It was more about immersing people into an atmosphere that was concerned with certain themes and conditions of the human experience. I’m interested in the notion that we all come from somewhere greater than the place we find ourselves now, whether that’s geographically, culturally or our heritage.
I’m also interested in the idea of diaspora as universal and not confined to the African context that we see in the film. It’s equally relevant to Armenians in France or the Irish in America as it is to Black folks. I just hope it hits a cord with whoever watches it and makes them feel a certain way about themselves and where we all come from, and how we have all come to be.
The film discusses one’s “becoming” being an eternal journey. Has the film been part of your own becoming?
I learnt that this film was something I needed to do. It’s my love affair with Blackness and the vast, almost unknowable quality that is the African diaspora. There is the recent history that is well documented and forms the pillar of the last 70 years of racial justice and pushing for equality. But I think that there is a deeper level to really considering and sitting with our collective cultures as we’ve found ourselves all over the world as Africans. That isn’t spoken about much and is something I am drawn toward naturally.
I’ve also embraced Toni Morrison’s idea that it’s not impossible to always hone in on crisis - there’s the love and the magic too. Those are the things I really enjoyed delving into in making this film. Essentially, it’s the vast array of virtuosity, talent and depth of history that each of my collaborators brought to this project that made it a very nourishing and healing thing to do and I want to continue exploring in this way.
Leave The Edges is co-produced by Lidz-Ama Appiah and Baff Akoto and was screened at the BFI London Film Festival until 18 October 2020.