The ecological crisis calls for vast and rapid socioeconomic changes that seem less than imminent. The changes seem remote, rather, and outside our grasp. And for many reasons: most concretely, the current system of socioeconomic power is a colossal obstacle, which can inspire a sense of futility. The system also tends to bind our desires, channel our attentions and shape worldviews, which affects what we find worth pursuing, possible, and even thinkable. Additionally, as is often pointed out, the development of industrial capitalism came with an overly dualistic and anthropocentric separation between human history/society and natural history. This separation not only enabled the over-exploitation of nature, but also helped create modes of existence as alienation from nature. Certainly, the current crisis makes the two sides of the separation appear ‘entangled for everyone to see’ (Latour 2010: 484). But seeing does not seem to drive us towards thinking and acting in ways required by the situation. Perhaps we need visions that both capture our situation and stretch beyond our situation towards credible new modes of existence. Here art can play a role. This can even be posed as an ethical-artistic challenge: how to help foster a new sense of planetary belonging for alienated modern subjects, while remaining rooted in – rather than escaping from – historical-political realities of causes and obstacles?

This chapter explores John Akomfrah's Vertigo Sea (2015) as an intriguing response to such an ethical-artistic challenge. Vertigo Sea is a video work projected on three large screens in a secluded dark room with cinematic sound that offers an ‘immersive experience’, as Nora Alter writes, comparable to ‘the effect of Richard Serra's large-scale steel objects, or Olafur Eliasson's sublime installations’ (2018: 3). It outlines a complex planetary whole, into which spectators tend to be gradually pulled. What they are pulled into, I should first clarify, is neither an image of nature as organic unity and oneness, nor an idealised sphere to get back to, nor a utopian blueprint – i.e., wholes as unengaging clichés or general abstractions that tend to veil differences and socioeconomic and historic realities. Instead, Vertigo Sea charts a whole that is immersive, visionary and critically historical and in ways sensitive to a feeling of planetary alienation.