The Otolith Group,
I See Infinite Distance Between Any Point and Another

Join us at Bar Laika on Saturday, October 20 at 5pm with the Otolith Group and the screening of their 2012 film on Etel Adnan titled I See Infinite Distance Between Any Point and Another. Our menu for the evening is prepared by The Otolith Group’s Anjalika Sagar.

I See Infinite Distance Between Any Point and Another (2012, 33’32”)
Etel Adnan’s highly influential writings, in French, English and Arabic have been read around the world. Her recent epic poem, Sea and Fog, published by Nightboat Books, in 2012, evokes the sea and the fog as metaphors for power and time, exploring the nature of the individual spirit and the sentience of the natural world. 

The Otolith Group’s film, shot largely in Adnan’s Paris apartment, centers on a reading of the first chapter of her poem, Sea. The sound of Adnan’s gentle voice, and the quiet but ever present ambient noise in her apartment, create a powerful, meditative atmosphere that draw upon the powers of philosophy to pursue the continuous mutation of matter into velocity. If poetry can be understood as a study in constraint, the film, I See Infinite Distance Between Any Point and Another, can be understood as an experiment in concentration and a study of gestures, that speaks of the mobility of language and the movement of the ocean. 

I See Infinite Distance Between Any Point and Another (2012) following from Hydra Decapita (2010), is part two of The Otolith Group’s trilogy of works on hydropolitics and hydroaesthetics. The Radiant (2012), completes this trilogy.

Menu
Levantine/Sino-inspired bowl with:
Brown rice 
Roasted parsnips and cauliflower in tahina sauce
Carmelized spicy Hijiki with peanuts 
Steamed kale and carrots with lemon vinaigrette 
Baked tofu or marinated tempeh
Pickles 

The Otolith Group is an award-winning collaboration whose practice spans the moving image, audio, performance, installation, and research. Founded in 2002 by the artists and theorists Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun, the group engages with the cultural and political legacies and potentialities of non-aligned movements, new media, Black Study, Afrofuturism, and Indofuturism while thinking speculatively with science fictions of the present. Their methodologies incorporate post-lens-based essayistic aesthetics that explore the temporal anomalies, anthropic inversions, and synthetic alienation of the posthuman, the inhuman, the non-human, and the anti-human. Expanding on the work of The Otolith Group is the public platform The Otolith Collective, whose work spans programming, exhibition-making, artists’ writing, workshops, publication, and teaching aimed at developing close readings of image and sound in contemporary society. Approaching curation as an artistic practice of building intergenerational and cross-cultural platforms, the collective has been influential in critically engaging the works of Chris Marker, Harun Farocki, Anand Patwardhan, Etel Adnan, Black Audio Film Collective, Sue Clayton, Mani Kaul, Peter Watkins, and Chimurenga in the UK, US, Europe, and Lebanon. The work of The Otolith Group and Collective has been presented widely, most recently at the Berlinale 13th Forum Expanded; Khiasma, Paris; The Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven; Sharjah Biennial 13; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Haus Der Kulturen de Welt, Berlin; and The Rubin Museum of Art, New York. The Otolith Group was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2010.