Akomfrah’s winning piece, Auto Da Fé, is one of his several recent works which engage with humankind’s long tradition of migration and refugees that goes back centuries. Akomfrah first conceived Auto Da Fé in 2009, when he said he first got a “sense” of the anti-immigrant feeling that was beginning to creep into everyday conversation and politics. “Most of the ideas in Auto Da Fé were really about saying to people: ‘You really have to consider the option that people are migrating literally to survive. Even at the lowest points of migration debates before, I had never heard that before. It has prompted him to keep revisiting Auto Da Fé, to tinker and re-edit.

Source: The Guardian January 26, 2017 22:00 UTC