The Otolith Group: Xenogenesis, Wall labels

Gemfish otoliths Collected from a trawl sample made by the ship FRV Kapala

Courtesy of the School of BioSciences, The University of Melbourne

Medium Earth 2013 HD video, colour, sound, duration 00:41:08 Although Medium Earth is the first work by The Otolith Group to be filmed in North America, it extends Eshun and Sagar’s investigation of the seismic psyche in Fukushima in 2011 and 2012. In Medium Earth, cinematography lingers on the fissures in California’s desert landscapes and underground infrastructures, sensitising viewers to the seismic forces moving beneath the face of the earth. Medium Earth is narrated by an unnamed female voice that identifies herself as an ‘earthquake sensitive’. She has trained herself to interpret her bodily pains as signs of impending seismic activity. As a medium who translates between deep time, human time and technological time, she demonstrates Sagar and Eshun’s aesthetic fascination with fictions of matter.

What do faults promise? What assurances do they give when they seek the line of least resistance? When the ground becomes a 70-second ocean? We feel faults below 2.0.

Thousands of us feel them, straining, building stress in the shale, folding rocks into compressed curves. Some of us hear faults at higher frequencies. Some hear the subsonics ...

Most do not, although many do. The faults talk to each other across the great basin. More than a hundred of them. They form a system. Families communicating with other families.

—The Otolith Group, from Medium Earth

Courtesy of The Otolith Group and LUX, London Commissioned by RedCat, Los Angeles

ho Does the Earth Think It Is? 2014 W installation with scanned letters, wooden shelves and vinyl

The Otolith Group’s obsession with the political imagination of futurity emerges in Who Does the Earth Think It Is?, an enquiry into vernacular practices of earthquake prediction in California. Eshun and Sagar extend the speculation of Medium Earth into an investigation of the psychic consequences incurred by living in and with the unknown time of imminent disaster. What emerges from this cross-section of unsolicited prophecies, threats and warnings posted by Americans to the United States Geological Survey Pasadena Field Office at the California Institute of Technology between 1993 and 2007 is a glimpse into the seismic psyche of the geological unconscious.

In the case of California, autodidactic practices of prediction license their projective imaginations through encounters with reports broadcast on television by experts from the USGS whose role is to reconstruct multi-causal seismic activity as a narrative ready for prime time.

A media ecology begins to accrete in which impending seismic activity is experienced as fear inseparable from permission.

The near future is lived as a modality of dread that permits practices of magical thinking in the present.

California’s psychological climate is apprehensive yet permissive.

It authorises amateurs to announce themselves as practitioners of prediction, promotion, prophecy and pre-emption.

Courtesy of The Otolith Group

—The Otolith Group

I n the Year of the Quiet Sun 2013 digital scans and archival film transferred to HD video, 16:9, colour, sound, duration 00:33:57; seating

In the Year of the Quiet Sun inaugurates The Otolith Group’s ongoing enquiry into the political imaginary of African emancipation. Eshun and Sagar adopt the commemorative stamp issued in Ghana from 1957 to 1966 by Kwame Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party as a device for narrating the grand project of African continental unification.

Tinted newsreel footage from the All-African People’s Conference in Accra in December 1958 is combined with a script that quotes from texts by Ruth First, Richard Wright and Frantz Fanon to reimagine both the prospect of a United States of Africa and the military coup of 24 February 1966 that terminated the prospect of African unity in Ghana.

In the Year of the Quiet Sun takes its title from the decrease in solar temperature that occurs every 11 years. From November 1964 to November 1965, the governments of many nation-states issued postage stamps to commemorate the first scientific expedition to study the surface of the sun. As the stamps turned their face towards the sky, they overlooked the unstable land of Africa’s newly independent states.

—The Otolith Group

Courtesy of The Otolith Group and LUX, London Commissioned by Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen

Sovereign Sisters 2014 computer animation transferred to black-and-white HD video, duration 00:03:47 (loop); installation with purified water Sovereign Sisters is the final work in The Otolith Group’s engagement with postal politics in the era of platform capitalism. It brings viewers face to face with the imperial ideal of global communication celebrated in Author du Monde, the monument commissioned by the Universal Postal Union in Bern, Switzerland, in 1907. René de Saint-Marceaux’s bronze and granite monument, which still stands in Kleine Schanze Park in Bern, personifies each continent as a racialised goddess, circling the globe in an eternal embrace. Sovereign Sisters uses 3D Lidar technology to transform the patriarchal presence of the monument into a spectral animation that evokes infrastructure’s aspiration to plan the planet.

In spectralising its deification of global communication into a greyscale pointcloud, Sovereign Sisters conjures the forces of infrastructure and automatism that lie dormant and sublimated by the patriarchitecture of monument as maiden.

Courtesy of The Otolith Group and LUX, London

—The Otolith Group

O Horizon 2018 original format 4K video, colour, sound, duration 01:30:00 The term ‘O Horizon’ is used by soil scientists to refer to the surface layer of organic matter continually altered by human existence. Sagar and Eshun adopted this agronomic term for their study of Santiniketan, West Bengal, India, where Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), the poet, dramatist, essayist, composer, artist, educator, social reformer and Nobel Prize-winning novelist, founded Visva-Bharati School of Art in 1921. Tagore’s educational ethos drew upon ancient Indian philosophies and Japanese and Chinese aesthetic traditions to fashion a pan-Asian ethos for artists and intellectuals opposed to the educational system imposed by the British empire. In its portrait of recitals, performances, choreography and discussion situated within an ongoing environmental struggle to preserve the health of soil against the attrition of global warming, O Horizon suggests the outlines of a Tagorean ethos for the 21st century.

O Horizon begins with a poem entitled ‘The Year 1400’, written by Tagore in 1896, in which he imagines his words travelling through time to be read by a poet from the next century. That poem suggested to us a dimension of time travel in Tagore’s work. It hinted at a transhistorical dimension within his poetic imagination. ‘The Year 1400’ became a portal through which we could enter a Tagorean universe, assembled from different modes and moods of study that recur throughout the video – ranging from dances, songs, discussions, and recitals to soil experiments that refer to the methods by which Tagore’s family terraformed the Bengali landscape upon which Visva-Bharati was founded.

—The Otolith Group

Courtesy of The Otolith Group and LUX, London Commissioned by bauhaus imaginista and co-produced with the Rubin Museum, with kind support of Project 88