Larry Achiampong

Larry Achiampong (*1984 London, lives in Essex) mainly uses image, acoustic and visual archives, live performance, and sound in order to express his ideas concerning intercultural and post-digital identity. In his works he explores both a shared and his own personal heritage, as a British man with roots in Ghana. He thereby considers constructions of the ​“self,” bringing together material from personal memories and archives, and offering different perspectives that uncover deeply rooted social and political ruptures in society today.

In the experimental film The Expulsion (2019) the narrator remembers the 1990s, when he accompanied his mother on her night-time jobs cleaning offices in the center of London. She was one of the ​“invisible” people who cleaned and looked after offices by night. Although the film is in color, the images are in dark grays and blues, which fits well with the plot in which the protagonists slowly and arduously clean toilets, kitchens, and offices. Achiam-pong invites us to reflect on an economic system in which people’s origin, class, and gender determine the professions they have and the ways they make a living. The film’s scenes are combined with memories recounted by the narrator’s voice, drawing a picture of London in the 1990s, a city where at that time gentrification was less developed than it is today.