Vertigo Sea, a three-screen film installation, combines fiction, nature documentary and essay. Akomfrah’s own staged footage and excerpts from BBC natural history television programmes merge in an unsettling juxtaposition of narratives and imagery: the marine environment, whaling, environmental collapse and human relationship with and to the sea. Shot on the Scottish island of Skye, the Faroe Isles and the Northern regions of Norway, the film references what Ralph Waldo Emerson called ‘the sublime seas’. Striking shots depict various instances of predatory behaviour at sea, including images of the slave trade, the global refugee crisis, the movement of migrant workers as well as political prisoners found adrift in the ocean. These references to familiar historical events and stories are recast as interminable vestiges of an eternal present. The sense of discord is emphasised by the film’s sequencing, which runs across three adjacent screens and results in a hallucinatory view of collective social realities.