Scroll.In: ‘Auto Da Fé’ shows how 400 years of migration in the face of religious persecution is a vicious cycle.
As America rages over its president’s decision to ban the entry of refugees, this film looks at four hundred years of forced migration. There are no words, and yet every individual conveys a tense disconnection from alien surroundings – they are far from home. Each individual is lost in hypnotised introspection.
“Over four centuries, they felt that their lives were somehow being shaped by forces of destruction, religious persecution, economic hardship,” explains John Akomfrah, a British artist. His video Auto Da Fé covers a long tradition of migration undertaken by humans, starting with the little known 1654 fleeing of Sephardic Jews from Catholic Brazil to Barbados.
The title, which translates to Acts of Faith, won the £40,000 Artes Mundi prize in Cardiff, the UK’s biggest prize for international contemporary art.
Categories: religious freedom, The Muslim Times, US Policy, US Politics, US PRESIDENT