INTERVIEW: John Akomfrah-Listening All Night to the Rain

Conceived for the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, John Akomfrah’s exhibition “Listening All Night to the Rain”, unfolds as a meditation on memory, displacement, and the fragile threads that bind us to the stories we inherit and the futures we fear to imagine.

In this conversation, John Akomfrah offers a window into the visions and uncertainties that shaped the project: a meditation on memory, migration, ecological fragility, and the resonance of stories carried across generations and geographies. His words serve as a guide through the exhibition’s layered visual world, where sound and silence, image and absence, intertwine to form a poetic inquiry into how we live, remember, and endure.

This prologue sets the stage for a dialogue that is not simply explanatory but deeply atmospheric. It prepares the listener to enter the exhibition through Akomfrah’s own sensibility—attentive, restless, and profoundly attuned to the textures of human experience. As the interview begins, we are invited to listen with him, to the rain and to the echoes it awakens.

 

John Akomfrah, Listening All Night to the Rain. Interview. Produced by TBA21 – Zona Cielo