Ed Halter on the Otolith Group
THE OTOLITH GROUP is a joint undertaking between Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun, each lifelong Londoners of transcontinental heritage. Named for the fragile equipment of the interior ear that senses steadiness and movement, Otolith have generated a considerable output over the course of twenty years. The core merchandise of Sagar and Eshun’s exercise include greater than twenty moving-image works of astonishingly assorted varieties, cinematic collages not merely of images and sounds however extra essentially of ideas, impressed by and purloined from science fiction, political philosophy, and aesthetics, with histories and theorizations of diasporic Blackness and the World South offering a fulcrum for the pair’s wide-ranging investigations. Radiating outward from Otolith’s filmmaking are occasions that discover associated concepts by different means: talks, seminars, packages of movies by others, installations, and endeavors as unplaceable as Glissantbot, a Twitter bot that has regularly circulated algorithmically decided quotes from Caribbean thinker Édouard Glissant each fifteen minutes for half a decade operating.
Otolith have had little truck with the worldwide movie competition circuit that has lengthy supported experimental movie, or with the printed, cable, and streaming networks which have sponsored formally adventurous tv programming. Sagar and Eshun’s twin artistic exercise has primarily taken place throughout the boundaries of a recent artwork world of worldwide museums, galleries, and biennials. Early of their profession, Otolith indicated that this displacement from a few of the conventional venues for superior shifting photos was an intentional one. Such a sentiment could also be inferred, for example, from an announcement about their set up Internal Time of Tv, 2010, a collaboration with filmmaker Chris Marker that reconfigures his 1989 miniseries The Owl’s Legacy as a multi-monitor atmosphere. Of their description of the work, the pair write that this shift into gallery areas “displaces the serial logic of the tv documentary and means that the context for an encounter with moving-image work that defies the conventions of tv making has largely shifted to the discussion board of artwork.”
Such an announcement additionally speaks of Otolith’s place of intentional (and inner) displacement vis-à-vis their chosen platform—Otolith Group could also be within the artwork world, however they aren’t of it. Their higher technique is the re-instrumentalization of this artwork world as a base for a twenty-first-century communications community. Sagar and Eshun hijack art-world buildings to serve not the wants of funding capital and particular person egos however quite the worldwide circulation of radical concepts. They search to create advanced connections amongst affiliated artists, musicians, and different thinkers, following an arachnoid impulse that builds supple, sturdy webs of solidarity. Eshun and Sagar are often categorised as an artwork collective, however in reality they function one thing like a manufacturing firm, one thing like an academy, one thing like a library, one thing like a radio station.
Eshun and Sagar are often categorised as an artwork collective, however in reality they function one thing like a manufacturing firm, one thing like an academy, one thing like a library, one thing like a radio station.
Otolith’s cinema has been hybrid and nomadic, marked by its refusal to stick to any constant medium or model. Artwork historian T. J. Demos famous in 2009 that Sagar and Eshun’s filmography to that time might be categorized throughout the quasi style of the essay movie, which he glossed as a “distinctive combination of documentary and dramatic imagery accompanied by poetic, historic, and infrequently autobiographical narration.” Extra particularly, he wrote, Otolith gravitate towards approaches “within the custom of such numerous filmmakers and teams as Black Audio Movie Collective, Harun Farocki, Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker, and Anand Patwardhan.” An affinity for such precedents is expressed in an enigmatic design that seems all through Otolith’s work, a circle resting atop three parallel strains, which the group appropriated from Godard’s militant cine-treatise Le Gai Savoir (1969). In its appearances in Godard’s work, the icon signifies, amongst different issues, the third world (to make use of the time period widespread within the late ’60s); Eshun and Sagar have steadily invoked the extra outer-spacey phrase “World 3” in relation to this signal, one indication of their deeply speculative and future-oriented outlook. This similar affinity is extra clearly demarcated by way of the artists Otolith have chosen to spotlight of their discussions and movie programming, together with all the administrators named in Demos’s litany, in addition to figures like Santiago Álvarez, Jean Genet, Mani Kaul, Henri Storck, Straub + Huillet—fairly a flock of keen-eyed and far-flying magpies.
Otolith’s dedication to the cinematic essay is obvious of their earliest main work, The Otolith Trilogy. Shot in a wide range of codecs, Otolith I, 2003, and II, 2007, combine private histories with futuristic fantasies, utilizing a voice-over by Sagar that imagines the diary of her grandchild, who seems again on our personal period from the early twenty-second century. The prologue to Otolith I lays out a situation during which a department of humanity has tailored their our bodies to life in outer area by evolving otolithic methods particularly calibrated for microgravitational existence. This new era can by no means go to Earth, and know of their planet of origin solely by way of its transmissions and recordings. “For us, there is no such thing as a reminiscence with out picture, and no picture with out reminiscence,” Sagar narrates in oracular tones in opposition to a montage of twentieth-century pictures set to dreamy synths. Over Tremendous 8, tv, and newsreel footage, she continues, “I sift getting older media from the tense current of the final century, in search of the essential factors, the thresholds. Looking for moments of turning into that start to inform me how they turned us.” It’s one of many quite a few moments in Otolith I and II that echo Marker’s propensity to flit by way of time and area through unusual thought loops. The movies think about the Iraq Warfare and the protests in opposition to it, Le Corbusier’s structure in Chandigarh and in France’s banlieues, and India’s involvement within the Soviet area program. As in Marker’s work, what ties the episodes collectively is a semifictional narrator-correspondent whose phrases turn into a thoughts display by way of which disparate photos might be skilled, serving to us to ascertain the trendy world as one each acquainted and estranged. We see footage of Sagar floating within the inside of a reduced-gravity plane, channeling her fictional descendant’s extraplanetary existence; she lies horizontally, head resting on fingers within the place of a reclining Buddha, drifting in a weightless dream, like so many characters in Marker’s 1983 Sans Soleil. “Area is our place now,” she muses, riffing on Solar Ra.
The exquisitely indirect Otolith III, 2009, departs from the premise of Otolith I and II, centering on The Alien, an unproduced 1967 situation by Satyajit Ray about an extraterrestrial who visits Earth, touchdown not in Washington or London however in rural Bengal. Ray’s situation is remembered each for its ambition to create the primary big-budget South Asian science-fiction movie and for claims by Ray and others that Steven Spielberg lifted components of it for Shut Encounters of the Third Sort (1977) and E.T. the Additional-Terrestrial (1982). However Otolith III doesn’t fear itself with these historic byways. It as a substitute realizes the script in essentially the most oblique method, reediting snatches from Ray’s movies to evoke The Alien because it may need appeared, including a polyphony of worldwide voices to think about The Alien’s characters coming to life and spiting their creator for abandoning their hopes of existence. “Simply script,” a clipped male voice states. “Twenty pages in a drawer. An concept. A risk. Nothing extra.” In its personal allusive approach, Otolith III achieves The Alien’s objective of repositioning the Eurocentrism of Hollywood science-fiction movies towards a South Asian vantage; because the conclusion to The Otolith Trilogy, it continues a displacement of science fiction’s spectacularity onto a extra delicate investigation of doable worlds.
The Otolith Trilogy would appear to adapt to author Samuel R. Delany’s definition of science fiction as a particular subset of narrative subjunctivity; that’s, as tales of the world that haven’t occurred however may.
Science fiction is among the primary mental fields that Otolith play in. Nicely earlier than the forming of the group, Eshun supplied a few of the most cogent and influential statements on Afrofuturism in his interviews for Black Audio Movie Collective’s The Final Angel of Historical past (1996). In his e-book Extra Good Than the Solar: Adventures in Sonic Fictions (1998), he propounded a neo-cybernetic principle of Black musical applied sciences, analyzing the futuristic sounds of artists like Solar Ra, Rammellzee, and Drexciya. The Otolith Trilogy would appear to adapt to author Samuel R. Delany’s definition of science fiction as a particular subset of narrative subjunctivity; that’s, as tales of the world that haven’t occurred however may. Science fiction, understood this manner, exists within the actions of an exploratory creativeness firmly bounded by the parameters of the actual, and it’s inside this similar dialectic that the Otolith Group select to function. Delany initially outlined subjunctivity in a 1968 lecture as “the strain on the thread of which means that runs between phrase and object”; in flip, lots of the movies of Sagar and Eshun work to unleash the subjunctive force-potential created amongst novel concatenations of sounds, voices, and pictures. On this, they observe the first classes that Marker, Godard, and different radical filmmakers took from the Soviet cinema of Dziga Vertov, Sergei Eisenstein, and Esfir Shub, which is that movie has the power to ascertain a brand new actuality—and to supply new thought—by way of reediting imprints of the bodily world.
In recent times, Otolith have shifted away from the disjunctive, agglutinative semiosis of montage, with two of their latest movies deploying, respectively, Bazinian naturalism and a hypnotically multilayered digital video synthesis. Ninety minutes of luxuriously volumetric lengthy takes steeped in thick sonic atmospheres, O Horizon, 2018, paperwork every day life at Santiniketan, a campus-cum–utopian neighborhood based by Rabindranath Tagore within the early twentieth century as a substitute for British colonial academic methods, and nonetheless in session at present. As seen in O Horizon, the campus feels directly like a closed universe of contemplation and a borderless neighborhood in porous interrelationship with the encompassing panorama. Pedagogy in Kathakali dance and classical Indian track coexists with coaching in soil science. College students study philosophy beneath the shade of historical bushes, surrounded by ethereal structure adorned with work and sculptures by pivotal modernist artists like Nandalal Bose, Okay. G. Subramanyan, and Benode Behari Mukherjee.
Within the title of the Otolith Group lie intimations of a sixth sense which may be cinema’s really main position, an interior sense of area and time, of ahead movement.
As a documentary of a college, this isn’t a Frederick Wiseman institutional exposé: O Horizon’s observational qualities aren’t about peeking behind the scenes to disclose the neighborhood’s underlying social equipment. The portrait is just not a lot of people working inside a system, however quite of the system itself as a holistic unity. Neither is the movie primarily an tour into sensory ethnography within the custom of filmmakers like Robert Gardner, regardless of its luscious and unhurried choices to eye and ear. The filmmakers are involved in picturing the college because the instantiation of a set of concepts—because the residing continuation of a modernism that imagined artwork, science, dance, track, and speech as interrelated and equal modes of understanding, in neighborhood with the pure atmosphere. For Otolith, this idyll is just not merely a retreat however can solely exist in relation to a particular association of worldwide energy. It additionally offers a variation on Otolith’s personal collaborative work. In an interview with Eshun and Sagar by curator Annie Fletcher for {the catalogue} of their touring exhibition “Xenogenesis” (itself named after and dedicated to the considered science-fiction author Octavia Butler), Sagar gives that “collective observe is derived from, and has all the time been enabled by, clearing area to suppose, by setting the parameters or limits of thought, by holding sure forces at bay. What’s it that pulls folks from the place of protest to the place of examine?”
Eshun and Sagar reimagine the essay movie by eradicating the verbal essay we have now come to count on, avoiding a narration-driven construction in favor of 1 whose which means is just not solely embodied by however articulated by way of an ordered perceptile expertise. The bits of language that the filmmakers do embrace sit alongside the pictures, quite than above them. O Horizon proposes an understanding of data past language, to be discovered within the migration of matter by way of time and area. The movie begins with a recital of Tagore’s 1896 Bengali poem “The 12 months 1400” (translated with English subtitles), which appears to undertaking the thinker’s consciousness into our current: Immediately, in 100 years, a lady’s voice asks us, Who’re you sitting, studying this poem of mine? With these strains—composed simply as science fiction was rising as a self-conscious style, and cinema as an equipment—Tagore evokes each temporal journey and alternate-world-building. Otolith image Santiniketan as a fancy technological intervention quite than a primitivist return to nature. As famous in one of many “Xenogenesis” wall texts, “Tagore’s household terraformed the Bengali panorama.”
Otolith’s most up-to-date movie, INFINITY Minus Infinity, 2019, continues the sensory investigations of O Horizon, however with an accent on the artificial quite than the pure, the chaos that arrived in modernity’s wake quite than modernist utopias. A collectively realized medley of dance, poetry, and the oration of texts directed by Sagar and Eshun with the latter’s sister Esi Eshun, it takes place inside a digital world of prolonged sound and picture alerts reprocessed and reshaped, a sequence of interlocking occasions that turn into constantly fluid, liquid, oceanic. A lot of it happens in a green-screened void, with berobed characters showing in opposition to the darkness, harking back to the guests from the long run in Marker’s La Jetée (1962), their foreheads marked by geometric glyphs that reverberate with chroma-keyed video. Related sigils decoration the faces of musicians in Otolith’s examine of composer Julius Eastman, The Third A part of the Third Measure, 2017—simply one in every of many visible and audial motifs which have threaded by way of their movies in delicate methods over time. INFINITY Minus Infinity is a consistently shifting flux of our bodies, histories, and theories: Dante Micheaux reads excerpts from Glissant; vocalist and motion artist Elaine Mitchener offers voice to phrases by Jamaican author Una Marson; Esi Eshun intones excerpts from speeches given within the Home of Commons concerning British immigration legislation and the Windrush era. The Black feminist considered thinker Denise Ferreira da Silva frames a multiheaded investigation that takes on numerous temporalities and scales, shifting from the legacies of British slavery and colonialism to Black Lives Matter to the terrestrial disruptions of the Anthropocene.“I can’t breathe,” sighs Esi Eshun deeply, within the guise of an ancient-futuristic Earth goddess.
INFINITY Minus Infinity would possibly supply some Normal Otolithic Idea to circumscribe the group’s sprawling undertaking. Cinema could be imagined as a reordering of perceptual info—primarily sight and sound however, by way of synesthetic analogy, contact and scent and style as nicely. INFINITY Minus Infinity reminds us of this multisensory potential with opening photos of a chroma-key-manicured hand caressing a tree department. Within the title of the Otolith Group lie intimations of a sixth sense which may be cinema’s really main position, an interior sense of area and time, of ahead movement—that’s to say, our deepest sense of orientation on the earth, the idea for all picture schemas and conceptual mapping.
“Xenogenesis” travels to the Irish Museum of Fashionable Artwork, Dublin, July 7, 2022–February 12, 2023.
Ed Halter is a founder and director of Mild Trade and a critic-in-residence at Bard School.
