In this online conversation The Otolith Group and the geographer Kathryn Yusoff will discuss the racial formation of geology from a black feminist perspective informed by Yusoff’s book A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None as well as of the Otolith Groups’s film INFINITY Minus Infinity (2019).

             INFINITY Minus Infinity (2019) brings together dance, performance, music and digital animation to compose a transhistorical cinematic zone that weaves together the unpayable debts of slavery and colonialism, the contemporary politics of citzenship and the ongoing climate catastrophe.

             INFINITY Minus Infinity (2019) addresses the policy of “hostile environment” enacted by the UK’s conservative government from 2012 onwards that discriminates against the Afro-Caribbean communities that settled in Britain and helped rebuild the country's industrial infrastructure after the Second World War. The recent effort to detain and deport people of the “Windrush generation”—named after the HMT Empire Windrush ship that sailed from Jamaica to London in 1948— reveals the commitment of the British state to disarticulate the forms of belonging of Afro-Caribbean populations whose cultural avant-garde aimed to decolonize the British Empire from within.

             Inspired by Black speculative fictions and cosmologies, a chorus of deities allude to the times and spaces of the United Kingdom’s environmental and racial hostility which are inscribed in the financial districts’ mirrored buildings that reflect the sky yet obscure ongoing extractions in neocolonial offshore tax havens.

             The film will be on view for 24h on May 25 at this link: https://vimeo.com/381484776

             INFINITY Minus Infinity (2019) is a commission of the Sharjah Architecture Triennial SAT01 and is co-produced with Z33 House for Contemporary Art, Design and Architecture, Hasselt.

             Kathryn Yusoff is Professor of Inhuman Geography in the School of Geography at Queen Mary, University of London, Mile End Road E1 4NS, U.K.  Most recently, she is author of A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, Minneapolis (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), a SI on “Geosocial Formations and the Anthropocene” (with Nigel Clark) in Theory Culture and Society, “Epochal Aesthetics” in E-flux, and Geologic Life: Inhuman Intimacies and the Geophysics of Race (forthcoming).

             The Otolith Group was founded in London in 2002 by artists and theorists Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun. The term ‘Otolith’ is named after an organ located inside the ear that enables humans to sense motion and gravity as they move in space. The Otolith Group operates as a platform for research and dialogue, while challenging the vertical divisions between the real and the imagined, history and fiction. Inspired by traditions of collective filmmaking, Sagar and Eshun integrates moving image with audio, image, text, installation, and curation to convey imaginations of futures engendered by the histories and presences of global African and Asian diasporas. The Otolith Group was short-listed for the Turner Prize in 2010 and has been featured in solo exhibitions at Argos Centre for Art and Media, Brussels (2007), MACBA, Barcelona (2011), Bétonsalon, Paris (2011), MAXXI, Rome (2011–12), and Project 88, Mumbai (2012), Bergen Kunsthalle (2014), Rubin Museum, New York (2018), Delfina Foundation, London (2014). Their latest solo exhibition Xenogenesis (2019-2020), presented by the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, will travel to the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge, The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester and the Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah.

[The Otolith Group was founded
in London in 2002 by artists and theorists
Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun.]



[Kathryn Yusoff is Professor of Inhuman
Geography in the School of Geography
at Queen Mary, University of London.]

In this online conversation The Otolith Group and the geographer Kathryn Yusoff will discuss the racial formation of geology from a black feminist perspective informed by Yusoff’s book A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None as well as of the Otolith Groups’s film INFINITY Minus Infinity (2019).

             INFINITY Minus Infinity (2019) brings together dance, performance, music and digital animation to compose a transhistorical cinematic zone that weaves together the unpayable debts of slavery and colonialism, the contemporary politics of citzenship and the ongoing climate catastrophe.

             INFINITY Minus Infinity (2019) addresses the policy of “hostile environment” enacted by the UK’s conservative government from 2012 onwards that discriminates against the Afro-Caribbean communities that settled in Britain and helped rebuild the country's industrial infrastructure after the Second World War. The recent effort to detain and deport people of the “Windrush generation”—named after the HMT Empire Windrush ship that sailed from Jamaica to London in 1948— reveals the commitment of the British state to disarticulate the forms of belonging of Afro-Caribbean populations whose cultural avant-garde aimed to decolonize the British Empire from within.

             Inspired by Black speculative fictions and cosmologies, a chorus of deities allude to the times and spaces of the United Kingdom’s environmental and racial hostility which are inscribed in the financial districts’ mirrored buildings that reflect the sky yet obscure ongoing extractions in neocolonial offshore tax havens.

             The film will be on view for 24h on May 25 at this link: https://vimeo.com/381484776

             INFINITY Minus Infinity (2019) is a commission of the Sharjah Architecture Triennial SAT01 and is co-produced with Z33 House for Contemporary Art, Design and Architecture, Hasselt.

             Kathryn Yusoff is Professor of Inhuman Geography in the School of Geography at Queen Mary, University of London, Mile End Road E1 4NS, U.K.  Most recently, she is author of A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, Minneapolis (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), a SI on “Geosocial Formations and the Anthropocene” (with Nigel Clark) in Theory Culture and Society, “Epochal Aesthetics” in E-flux, and Geologic Life: Inhuman Intimacies and the Geophysics of Race (forthcoming).

             The Otolith Group was founded in London in 2002 by artists and theorists Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun. The term ‘Otolith’ is named after an organ located inside the ear that enables humans to sense motion and gravity as they move in space. The Otolith Group operates as a platform for research and dialogue, while challenging the vertical divisions between the real and the imagined, history and fiction. Inspired by traditions of collective filmmaking, Sagar and Eshun integrates moving image with audio, image, text, installation, and curation to convey imaginations of futures engendered by the histories and presences of global African and Asian diasporas. The Otolith Group was short-listed for the Turner Prize in 2010 and has been featured in solo exhibitions at Argos Centre for Art and Media, Brussels (2007), MACBA, Barcelona (2011), Bétonsalon, Paris (2011), MAXXI, Rome (2011–12), and Project 88, Mumbai (2012), Bergen Kunsthalle (2014), Rubin Museum, New York (2018), Delfina Foundation, London (2014). Their latest solo exhibition Xenogenesis (2019-2020), presented by the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, will travel to the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge, The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester and the Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah.

The Otolith Group, INFINITY minus Infinity,  2019, Video still

The Otolith Group, INFINITY minus Infinity, 2019, exhibition view in Le Déracinement. On Diasporic Imaginations at Z33 House for Contemporary Art design and Architecture, Hasselt, 2021. Photo Selma Gurbuz.