Good evening. I'm Jay Sanders, the director of ArtistSpace, and I want to welcome you to the second of three ArtistSpace dialogues organized and hosted by New York-based writer and editor Kieron Finlayson. ArtistSpace is committed to making our programming inclusive and accessible and is continually working to improve and expand our accessibility measures. This event features live transcription, which can be accessed in your Zoom menu, and this event will be archived on our website. We're so grateful to Kieran for this extremely thoughtful series, inviting artists and philosophers who examine the histories, possibilities, and failures of left politics in a global context.
Last month, on April 11th, Kieran spoke with artist Sammy Baloggi, and that illuminating talk is available on our website. Sunday, May 16th, the third Artist Space dialogue in which Kieran will be joined by scholar Brendan Harvey for a discussion with philosopher Peter Osborne will take place. Tonight we're extremely grateful that Angelica Sager and Kojo Eshin of the Otolith group could be here. To introduce them and Kieran and to say more, I'm turning it over to Artist Space's Stella Sillman. Thank you, Jay, and thank you all for joining us today for the second event of our Spring Dialogue series. I am delighted to introduce our two speakers today, well, three, Kieron Finlayson and the Autolith Group. Kieron is an arts worker and writer based
in New York, acutely engaged in the contemporary conditions of art production. Writing on artists such as Pope Bell, Jamal Cyrus, Ralph Lemon, and Cameron Rowland, he carefully reads objects and their histories through a decidedly Marxist framework, interrogating legacies of slavery, colonialism, and the effects of a global racial capitalism. Kieran's essays on art, politics, and philosophy have appeared in magazines and journals, including Parse, Kunsthundpolitik, and Artforum. He is currently the managing editor at Blank Forms. with Brendan Harvey who will join us for the next and final event in the series. He co-hosts a reading group on volume one of Marxist Capital as part of the Socialist Night School of the
Central Branch of New York City's DSA. He also assists with their political education programming and holds an elected position there. Today, Kieron has invited Anjali Sagar and Kojo Eshin of the the Autoliths group for a conversation surrounding their vast body of research-based work, which spans the mediums of moving image, audio, performance, installation, and curation. Addressing anti-colonial struggles across time and space, their work engages critical theory, temporal anomalies, post-human alienation, and the environmental conditions that threaten contemporary life. Their narrated essay film, In the Year of the Quiet Sun, which takes its name from the decrease in solar surface temperature that occurs every 11 years, chronicles the Pan-Africanist
pop designs of postage stamps issued by the nation states of the world from 1964 to 1965 to commemorate the first expedition to study the sun. Throughout the video, ghostly abstracted images of the celestial stamps are interspersed with archival footage documenting the on-the-ground instability of newly established independent African states. In their assembled space, quiet astronomical time converges with the grinding steady struggle of peoples emerging from colonial subjugation. The Autolith Group was founded in 2002 and their works have been exhibited and screened at institutions internationally, including the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Buxton Contemporary, Van Aeba Museum, the Tate Modern, and the Goethe
Institute, among many others. Their touring retrospective Xenogenesis opens at the Sharjah Art Foundation in October of 2021 and then the following year at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. They also have a book that accompanies the exhibition titled XG which is forthcoming. One final note, their video in the year of the quiet sun is currently available on our website through tomorrow. So if you haven't had the chance to watch it, you can watch it tomorrow or after this talk. So now without further ado, please join me in welcoming Otolith here today and I will hand it over to Kieran.
Thanks. Hi, everybody. Thanks. I'm just going to read maybe a short introduction and then I'll hand it over to Kojo and Anjali and then we'll watch an excerpt from a film. So I first encountered the Autoliths Group's work through a conference about the non-alignment movement convened as part of After Year Zero slash geographies of collaboration since 1945 at Berlin's Haus der Kultur in der Welt in 2013. My supervisor at the time kind of generously encouraged me to take the day off so I could attend and try to meet my favorite writer at the time, Fred Moten. The film, In the Year of the Quiet Sun, was installed as part of the exhibition and I was completely taken with it, not only because of a family history of stamp collecting but because of its fascinating combination of
socialist and neo-Gardie-ite imagery. The international intrigues it discerns in official design, the unfolding dramas of national liberation and neocolonialism, non-alignment and political betrayal, the crossroads of pan-Africanism and communism. Kind of like Adorno says of artistic experience, I wanted not for the work to relate to me but to be able to relate myself to it, to bring myself to its level by learning more about the historical sequence it presents in capsule form, to read again or for the first time in some cases Nkrumah, Wright, Lumumba, Padmore, to develop an eye for historical detail, to understand the pageantry of statecraft, and to become immune to ticket thinking and immersed in this era of tremendous change and heartbreaking stasis. The next summer, Hydra de Capita, their video about the Zong ship, J.M.
Turner, and Drexia was on view when the shadows took shape at the Studio Museum Harlem in 2014. I was amazed by this sequence overlying the Conant Project audio recordings with up-close images of rippling water which combined a powerful effect and appeared to be the language of the universe. The summer after that their collaboration with Chris Marker, the inner time of television, was on view at MoMA. It's a 13 channel presentation of Marker's documentary series, The Al's Legacy, from 1989, installed on CRT televisions arranged in a circle. Here occasionally bands of purple and yellow would race across all the screens in a sequence and bend the images and so the obvious intellect of the work was recast in the light of the mysteriousness of the visuals. I later learned
from talking to a MoMA conservator that the effect was also a mystery to the museum and that it was unintentional and taken weeks for preservationists to discover what was going on. The bands were electromagnetic interference caused by the subway so trains passing underneath were interfacing with with this deaccessioned viewing technology. The infrastructure of the city can intervene to kind of prove the artist's point. The work is part of a project that the group were calling a monument to dead television. And so a month after I moved to Surrey in 2015 for grad school, I traveled an hour and a half to attend the opening of the Chimaringa Library, an exhibition at the showroom presented by the Ottoweth Collective. I arrived a few hours early on accident and got roped into helping with install. I took the train back to serve it in for my lecture and then came back up to Marlebone
that evening to see the finished show. The exhibition featured a series of events by a group of young artists who invited me to join them and ended up becoming some of my closest friends in the city. And that night at the opening, I was introduced to Kojo, who told me he was leading a seminar on Moten's In the Break at Goldsmiths. And his class would be reading the opening chapter aloud, line by line, for the better part of an academic year. He invited me to join as a visiting student. So I feel a debt of gratitude to the Autolith Group for making inspiring, challenging, and intellectually rewarding work, as well as for their social open-handedness and their commitment to fostering collectivity. I'm grateful to Kojo for being my teacher and modeling a generous way of reading and thinking that I try to carry with me. So I'll pass it over to them. Thank you, Kieran. I must admit, I didn't quite realise the extent to which you've been
tracking the work of the Oswald Group, but it's very moving for me to hear you narrate those steps, especially because each of them has a contingency built into them. so yeah thank you for that um so yes i just wanted to add to that and say thank you it kind of makes it all feel worthwhile actually in times such as these yeah really it does so we're going to begin our conversation um by uh showing a section from in the year the quiet sun for those of you who haven't had a chance to watch the video as Stella said it's going to be up for another few hours
but just to in a way both open up and provide a kind of focus of attention for our conversation we're going to show the final six or seven minutes because that will allow us to begin in a conversation which we've been having for a while and now it's time to make it public. So it's great to see people here. So maybe we could go to our first clip. In Lagos, Nigeria's troops assassinate Prime Minister Tafawa Balewa. As Fidel Castro's speech draws the Tri-Continental Conference to its close at the Chaplin Theatre
in Havana, while President Nkrumah inaugurates the Volta River Project. On the 21st of February 1966, Nkrumah boards a Ghana Airways VC10 for Hanoi at the invitation of President Ho Chi Minh. As the plane approaches Peking, armed forces depose his government in Accra while preparations
begin for a festival in Dakar. What is my name? My name is Benin, Ethiopia, Monomitapa. My name is Africa. Gather round me. Gather round my writers, musicians, artists.
For we have many moments of creativity and history to share. Moments in which we shall tell the world who I am. Here on the western rim of Africa, here in Dakar in the spring of 1966, I greet you, gifted artists.
We watch for the moment when the astronomical calendar enters the political time of Pan-Africa. A camera moves away from the Earth to fix its lens upon the surface of the Sun.
As the solar cycle reaches its quiet phase, 2,730,920 Ghanaians vote for a one-party state. and 2,452 vote against. Mariner satellites orbit the magnetic field, while Nkrumah proposes to mobilise the Navy and the Air Force against Ian Smith's regime in Rhodesia. Nkrumah becomes a Tsar at home and a Leninist abroad.
one very distinctly hears the sound of rusty chains, the groans of distress, the bruised flesh so constantly present in this stifling noonday that our shoulders droop with the weight of it. So yeah, I wanted to maybe start from the ending, where it seems, obviously it's maybe difficult to tell from the excerpt, but the register of the film has shifted. It becomes more poetic and abstract. of course like the the science fiction dimension kind of gets turned up as you speak about the astrological calendar entering the time of pan-africa and the inspiring imagery and the
heroic sequence of infruma's rule are cast in a different light um seems that from the end the narrator's estimation of the pan-africanist project has changed um and it's kind of interested in but a bit ambivalent about the actuality of pan-africanism certain realities of non-alignment Richard Wright comes up earlier in the film, who's another figure you return to throughout your work, especially in Nucleus of the Great Union, who also has complicated and changing feelings about both Pan-Africanism and Communism. I just wanted to ask you first about this motif of the convergence of celestial and historical time and maybe what the ending of the film suggests about the meaning of Pan-Africanism for the present. Shall I go first?
Sure. I won't talk exactly directly about this film, but you talk about the convergence of political time or just you can remind me of what you said, but celestial time and let's say historical time. I think this has been very much present in all of our work since the first work where we in Otolith 1 where we think about time in relation I would say vertically from everything that is in earth and on earth and inside earth till to the cosmos. I think
the idea of the stone of the ear relates, I think, it's a term in a way, Otelift, that we've kind of grown up with or grown into. It's become more than we imagined it to be, in that, you know, we were thinking of it as the stone of the ear, to point at the audible, I suppose, and the oratory and vocality. But it has also, I think, opened up kind of the sedimentations of geologic time for us as well, and the listening of stones, for example, in medium earth, the listening to stones. So I think the, let's say, the celestial
also as a kind of space of the spiritual, which I think for us is a space of imminence and possibility and unthought and the unthought is very much related to how we understand post-human time and humans' historical understanding and place within that. I think picking up from that, I think Pan-Africanism itself was still somewhat unthought when we embarked on this project. I thought I understood the kind of parameters of it, but I hadn't
really grasped the world making and world building scale and scope of it. I really hadn't. And to me that's actually the fundamental stakes of the Pan-Africanist project is to scale up the political imagination, the African political imagination, from the independence of one country, Ghana, to the liberation of the continent of Africa, to the unification of the continent under some kind of regional federalism or regional federation,
which has the capacity to become an African Union or United States of Africa. For that to happen, the world context, what Nkrumah calls the general historical pattern, would have to change. The United States of Africa would require the reorganization and reordering of the world. In that sense, Pan-Africanism is a global project. and it's an interscalar project. So once we grasped that, and in fact that's, it's written out very clearly, there's no real mystery to it, the question was why did people continually
narrate pan-Africanism as a dream, as a hopeless dream, why did subsequent critics continually narrated in that way what we began to understand was that it's some cold war a cold war history had re-narrated pan-africanism as a dream whereas actually it was um it was a question of policy and a question of um uh kind of it was both it both had a status dimension and a cultural dimension it existed at all levels and all scales of reality
and what we began to realize was that the coup d'etat which is what you see at the beginning those images that are staged for television this kind of um pyro political ritual of burning these marxist literature and socialist literature that is the closing of the african political imagination that's what the 66 coup was about so if you're born after that then you're born after that closure and that closure becomes part of the designed effect of the military coup of February 24th, 1966. So that if you go to Ghana now you will see very few signs of the material
or visual or public cultures of the first republic of 1960 to 1966 or of the Conventional People's party that Nkrumah founded in 1949 and that existed up to 66 and exists subsequently but as a shadow of its former self you will just see very little of this grand experiment in actually existing pan-african socialism it's just not there it's been it's not just been forgotten by time it was erased and disavowed so in order to imagine that the postage stamps became useful for us
because they effectively had survived the deliberate destruction and burning of material visual and public culture they'd survive because they're traveling globally so you could use those poster stamps as as um inactive artifacts as as historically indexical but politically inoperative artifacts you could use them to re-narrate the kind of what we call the political calendar of pan-Africanism, the way in which Ghana saw itself as what Richard Wright called a pilot project for
the new Africa. And so that was kind of part of the ambition of Quiet Sun and the whole idea of the Quiet Sun, again this phenomenon we've never heard of, this idea that every 11 years the sun, the temperature of the sun drops slightly so that you can undertake, so that NASA can undertake scientific expeditions. The idea that you would have these small standardized stamps to characterize this epic scientific expedition was compelling in and of itself, but the idea that we could use that um that celestial astronomical perspective
to cast a glimpse back and to create this relation between the two seem to us to gesture towards um the planetary significance of pan-africanism that's really what we wanted to get at what we now know after Adam Getachew we would call world making after empire but we didn't have that vocabulary yet for what it was we were grasping for but that I can see is what we aimed to do and this conjunction of this of the astronomical and the political the political calendar suggested by Susan Zontag and the astronomical time. It was a way of bringing those two things
into a kind of relation of political astronomy and earth to sky and stars to soil and making them speak to each other. Thank you. Just kind of quickly wanted to look at two other elements in the film. I guess at the end you start to have the reversal of audio and the reversal of video and you have the, I think what you just call the the pyro-political display is kind of thrown in reverse and these papers of Lenin and Capital and these types of documents from the Kwame and Pruma Ideological Institute return into the hands of the people who are throwing them away. So I wanted to ask about that,
and also just your use of color filters on the archival footage, because in many of the early works, the archival stuff is presented pretty, it's very much presented as this is directly from the archives and the materiality of the archives and the visuals and all that type of stuff, and and that also returns in later stuff but here it's more kind of like worked with or played with in a certain way. Angelique, do you want to take the colour question and I'll take the reversal question? No, I want to take the reversal question but we could also talk about, I could also talk about the colour. I mean, I just want to maybe just begin with something on the reversal. I mean, you can
go into it as well, Kojo, but I guess you've got lots to say about it. But I think the work formally addresses many different events, not only do the stamps, you know, on a kind of minutiae, minute detail of the stamp, the actual miniature nature of it, the scale of it and what it represents, many different events, political events, you know figures, various different figures, industrial projects, world making projects, you know I would say like analysis of plants, you know flora and fauna are inscribed within many of these stamps, all kinds of things. So not only do the stamps
in a way kind of produce many different temporal effects, but also the way that the film is structured, many different juxtapositions sonically, but also with different periods and different times. So in that sense the reversal is not just a literal reversal, it is also can be seen as a potential. It can be seen as going in many different directions, it's not only a literal reversal. The idea that things can move in different directions I think is what we kind of wanted to for me that's what the image does as well that's why that's why it kind of lives
in a way because it actually manages i think to produce that effect which um is one of those things when we make a work uh that we kind of want to generate a kind of um alienation you know And we only know when the work is finished, when we have generated it enough that none of us are quite sure what's happened. But we are sure, but it's speaking to all of us in different ways. That includes the editor. So I would say that these kind of complex juxtapositions of temporal scale produce a kind of vehicle. One could say it's the figure that moves through the subject, that moves through the work,
that can actually feel like they are moving in many different directions all at once. In relation to colour, we were very, you know, the colours of the stamps are just so vivid and chalk-like and multiple that, you know, we were very interested, we worked a lot with you know playing with with tints um but it was also a quote by benjamin um benjamin's essay the stamp shop from 1928 in which he wrote that do color sequences of the long sets
perhaps refract the light of a strange sun um did the postal ministries of the vatican or ecuador capture rays unknown to us and why are we not shown the stamps of the superior planets, the thousand gradations of fire red that are in circulation on Venus and the four great shades of Mars and the unnumbered stamps of Saturn. So this opened up the kind of through poetic license a kind of a dive into colour, you know, as a kind of spectral space of consciousness, of the different
temporal forms of consciousness that you move through in the film. Yeah, so picking up from that, it's the idea that every frame is tinted, every frame, but they cycle through this color palette suggested by Benjamin's essay or kind of hinted at. And that means you do change the kind of, of, you create a kind of assembly out of very different kinds of films, very different kinds
of archival images, some of which come from, you know, Pathé News, some comes from Jean Rouch's film Jaguar, some come from this amazing film Black Star directed by Joachim Helweg from the German Democratic Republic, suggested to me and asked by Doreen Mende, and that film is very rare because it's filmed in 1964 and there are no films filmed in Ghana in 1964 after the republic becomes a people's democracy a one-party state there are no there are no films maybe the
only one so all of these very different materials are all enter into this chromatic spectrum as as Anjali points out. To speak to your point about reversal, that's really informed by a close reading of the great South African communist, Ruth First. Her 1970 book, The Barrel of a Gun, Political Power and the Military Coup in Africa from 1970, which is a phenomenal book in which she analyzes military coups in Ghana, Sudan and Nigeria in order to draw out the hypothesis that the military
is the least decolonized aspect of the new state. Her argument is that the military owes its formation to its training in the colonial system. So from the lowest ranks to the highest ranks you will find the military allegiance to the colonial system so that after independence the military becomes a dual power it's following its own law and it refuses to really go along with the new system and she makes a really brilliant analysis of what happens when Ghanaian troops go to the
Congo to defend Lumumba but are forced to obey the authority of the United Nations and then forced to oppose Lumumba and she says Ghanaian troops watched as Congolese soldiers imposed their force on Congolese politicians and she says it was just a shock and she calls the whole episode a process in which liberation goes into reverse and so what she analyzes is a counter-revolution That's what the murder of Lumumba and his colleagues and the destruction of his new nascent government,
it was a counter-revolution which sent the liberation project into reverse. It was a turning point. It was really one of the most consequential murders of the 20th century. And so that moment when you see the two shots where you see the Marxist literature flying back into the hands of people who have clearly been paid to celebrate, It's about drawing attention to the carnival of counter-revolution.
It's about signalling the kind of staging of an anti-socialist moment. The argument is, and this is what we realized afterwards, is that 66 for the continent is similar to 73 for Latin America. The assassination and bombing of Allende in 1973, the overthrow of the CPP is as consequential for the continent as the overthrow of Allende was for the South American continent. And the military who come into power bring with them the World Bank and the IMF.
So neoliberalism begins in 66 in the continent, not in 89, not in 92, not in 73, in 66. And all of that is being celebrated in that pyro-political carnival of burning, burning of books. So that's part of what we wanted to indicate. part of what we wanted to at least speak to and evoke anyway the carnivalesque sense of reaction wow thank you um it's extremely rich answers um it's like kind of following on from that i kind
of wanted to ask about kind of the general uh like the specter of political failure uh in your work kind of starting with Otolith 1, your first video, the narrator's reflecting on the failures of the kind of ongoing or ongoing in our present, then ongoing massive demonstrations in the UK against the Iraq war. In Year of the Quiet Sun and in Statecraft, there's a certain Pan-Africanist dream that would reorganize, but we do kind of end on, and we end on the down note, but then also the down note thrown into reverse so it's the temporality is complicated and then your work communists like us you have on the one hand these incredible photographs of this internationalist
uh communist conviviality from these different women's organizations from all over the all over the second and third worlds meeting with each other but then the the text comes from godard's les chinois and it's this kind of dialogue about red terror and this there's this kind of tragic dimension to French Maoism there. So it's kind of one, so and a lot of the work is like looking at these moments in the 20th century from the the vantage of the future, but it doesn't revisit them in a celebratory mode. So I just wanted to ask you about kind of like left-wing melancholia and ambivalence and in general your relationship to the political and historical material that you draw on? I think melancholia is maybe one way of thinking about it, but I think the idea of a left-wing
Melancholia, I think for me seems a bit, seems to, you know, speak to a very kind of wide field and and it seems to generalize, I think, in a way complex contextual specificities and characterizes the idea of the left as a kind of encompassing whole when in fact it is the opposite, of course. You know, there is no global without all of these complex differences, I think that, and arguments and struggles, and I think that the sense after 9-11 we felt another closure, you know, Othlith started soon after that, and I met Kojo and we started talking about this, the sense that the Iraq demonstrations felt like a certain closure, where all the kind of
projects and progressive projects of the global south would be turned into, would be cast, people would be cast, those struggles would be cast as almost terror suspects. We felt that the future was nothing but suspicions for those histories. And I think we were interested in the complexity of the structures of feeling that that sense of loss evoked and wanted to ask questions I suppose of otherwise assumed histories and think about producing I would say new images and new feelings and new relations. So the work for us was not to create
emotive states such as melancholia or a sense of loss or longing, but nor did we want to dispense with a kind of emotive state in relation to the image. But the point was and continues to be in how juxtapositions and assemblies of forces on the screen works to extend, I would say, and enhance alien states of feeling, new memories that go off in all directions, and feelings and political relationships that can only happen on the screen. So, you know, the more unrecognizable the work, like I was saying before, was to us, the better this generative state of thinking around those histories in relation to temporal scales. And I think I was thinking about Melanie
Klein's you know work on the depressive position where she begins with the paranoid schizoid position and moves to the depressive position and of the you know the paranoid schizoid of a good bad object but leads to a but lead this leads should lead to a whole object relation and I think the work in this sense for me when I look back on it and look forward to it I think this sense of the personal and the political and how one might narrate a kind of auto fiction within the essayistic structure was a way to create a kind of new narrative and a way to discover a form of life or events that might take existence out of racialized and gendered experience
and add opacity as a register of resilience and protection against the categorical demands of representational value production for institutions. And the sense of wanting to, I would say, think with the unthought or produce a generative alienation both sonically and visually felt, it just felt like that was the only way to go. It just felt like there's no other way to think about the complexity of the world that faces us and continues to face us. So, maybe you want to add to that, Kajir?
Yeah, yeah, no thank you for that, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, I think it's a question of returning to moments of contingency, turning points in history and revisiting them in order to evoke what Glissant calls you know a prophetic vision of the past so to return to the past and re-narrate it so that it so that it's reopened and what this means is that especially
tones of certainty and victory and a kind of temporality of future victory narrated in a tone of certainty. We tend to revisit those but without invoking either certainty or the victory. So you get these paradoxical states, like in a way nearly everything Nkrumah spoke about publicly was spoken in this tone of kind of certainty and forward-lookingness,
it's kind of futurist triumphalism almost, and part of what it's about is revisiting that in hearing the fact that that tone of futurity and certainty and victory were rhetorical gambles which could not actually guarantee their own outcomes. so that when we return to them it's a question of not it's a question of not refighting those same battles like every time we return to a moment in history it's it's it's like uh you
register that you're in a different problem space from that time so it's not a matter of taking up arms on behalf of Veronique from La Chinoise or taking up arms on behalf of Lumumba or on behalf of Nkrumah or on behalf of Kadona but it's also not a question of putting them in the dock of history and putting them on trial. It's not also a question of writing up a balance sheet of success and failures. That's pretty much what a lot of political, so-called political science and political theory does. It writes a balance sheet of this was a success and this was
a failure. The left failed here and they succeeded there. Nkrumah failed here and then he succeeded here. So we're not really satisfied with any of these positions, neither the position of a kind of trans-temporal solidarity, nor the position of a kind of juridical trial, you know, and nor the position of the economic balance sheet. Instead, I would say it's a question of quiet it's trying to find a different tone or of course a structure of feeling to
evoke this prophetic vision of the past um and so that's part of the experiment is to do that each time and one of what emerges from that is is not as legible as failure or as melancholia either in Benjamin's sense or Wendy Brown's sense but more a kind of more a kind of minor key a kind of a different chromatic a different chromatic re-narration like rewriting in a different key.
Thank you. Anjali, do you want to say something? I mean, I was just going to say that one of the kind of formal methodologies, I would say even though it's quite abstract but i think we are we like the idea of thickening time as a way to decolonize time um by opening up the scales that's you know and these can also be sonic scales that contribute to existence right so the sense that the way to counter capitalism's endless present and his calculative machinery um kojo brought up calculus so this kind of made
me think of this um is by um actually opening up uh various different um relations within that um i think sadia hartman is always robin j kelly and you know when they talk about enclosure or Fred Moten talks about enclosure they're all talking about in a way ways through that as opposed to ways out of it um and I sometimes think about this in relation to what a science fiction of the present is you know or what a hack is you know now like if if if at one time the blues
was the hack or if at one time free jazz was and still continues to help you think about the hack then what is the hack is it a hack is it it's literally a algorithmic hack so I think cinema has a kind of almost like a kinetic responsibility to this architectural complexity of space that is opened up to us now. We think sometimes of the films as sculptural objects that you can keep moving around and around. and I've been thinking a lot about kinesis in relation to a response to the complexity that
sort of let's say you know Susan Shipley opens up in her work in relation to material witness in her new book material witness and the relation to events and the multiple perceptions of events as well the kind of truth of events but then the perception and that's post-human as well so yeah I just wanted to add to what you were saying Kojo. Thank you I'm gonna maybe combine two questions here but I guess because I've been kind of looking back on the history of British anti-austerity, the student movement around 2010
that was very influential too and kind of politicized a lot of my friends, just kind of thinking about the coming COVID austerity. So I've been kind of looking back at that, and there's, you know, I guess a good amount of discourse about the kind of the radicalism of of the polytechnics and plate glass universities in the UK kind of before they were neoliberalized and restructured. And there was a whole very intense movement against this restructuring and especially the attack on the humanities. And just because you both have kind of affiliations with Middlesex and with Warwick University. So I kind of wanted to ask about these institutions
but also you do a lot of work on Channel 4. The legacy of Channel 4 taking works that were, especially Black Audio Film Collective works and also produced for public television. It's also this beautiful moment of publicly funded artistic and political experimentation. And so you're extending that work and bringing it into the contemporary era and usually via the art world. So I kind of just wanted to ask about, about with the kind of, with the loss of both like this era of kind of like publicly funded television and also this era of kind of like publicly supported higher education and the transition of a lot of this work
into the art world. I guess I was wondering, do you feel like, I don't know, have institutions or kind of non-institutional social forces able to uh been able to fill these types of gaps um maybe i'll start i'll start and uh keep it concise i think you know um if you're formed by um let's say the pedagogic imperative of something like challenge four if a lot of your primal scenes of encounter with cinema are happening through the television screen then that means you will be searching in the wake of that
that, aftermath of that pedagogic moment. In a way you will be searching for ways to recreate that pedagogic encounter with the screen so that when you encounter the post-cinematic you're still going to try to work out ways to evoke an intimacy with the screen because in a way these formative encounters with film and film theory are mediated through television. So the, this primal screen will really shape you.
to you and I think it accounts for a kind of passion for pedagogy I think which runs through the work just a kind of a kind of a le gay savoir a joy of knowledge a joy of a joy of of a joy of learning actually, a kind of cine or cine didacticism which we're not afraid of at all. In the UK that's a kind of bad object but actually you find many pockets
of people who share that kind of pleasure in the pedagogic and who find ways to create it and recreate it wherever they are. So I think, yeah, that's what happens when you live through that and you're shaped by that. And very briefly in terms of Warwick, of course, my particular kind of engagement wasn't so much Warwick as the CCRU or the C-Crew as some people call them. And, you know, they were very much a kind of, very much not an institution. They were very much this group of friends who were enacting an experiment.
They were an influence because they were so committed to their thinking, and they were so committed to each other. They were really writing for each other and to each other. So they were their own, they created their own norms, and they kind of suspended a lot of seemingly institutional norms. They worked out a way to negotiate an institution, and they worked out a way to institute themselves. And that kind of self-instituting, that kind of socialization was really very powerful
to see it operative and to see how generative it was, how many things they could do. So I think, yes, I do seek that out, whether it's with Chinarenga, or whether it's with Sixteen Beaver, or whether it's Black Quantum Futurism, you are searching for that kind of instituant power, people who do that work. But in relation to Channel 4, you know, it was initiated, you know, by a liberal Labour government and established in 82 during Thatcher's premiership and it was a bit of a Trojan horse in fact because you know Channel 4 was a new channel and there was going to be a they were
supposed to advertise and blah blah blah but kind of within all of that they they had a kind of job to they were being asked to basically think about this term multiculturalism and and produce kind of multicultural programming and there were a bunch of expectations of what that was supposed to be you know i mean just before i get into that i think it's important not to dispense with the idea of public television you know i think what uh you know one learns from from these self-instituted moments and movements was that there were conversations going on between various figures at the time already, you know, like Hanif Qureshi and you know, and Faroov Dondi and
Alan Fountain and you know these various different figures and June Giovanni and all these different characters from the Black Arts movements, they were all thinking about the diasporic experience in relation to race and class and gender and I think what they were you know what they really what they didn't what they didn't assume was that people would not be able to understand was that would that people would not be able to understand the complexity of the experience and the work being made by all these different independent producers And when I say independent producers, I mean not just black collectives, but I mean gay
lesbian collectives. I know those terms are old-fashioned, but that's how they used them then. You know, there were, you know, all kinds of different groups making very different films and short videos and experimenting in many different ways. And there was also bands. You know, I also think of bands as independent producers. I think the relation to self-instituting was manifested by this idea that one could be in a band or one could make films or one could write, but very much thinking around the culture being produced both within the kind of senses of imperialism, the cities, from by the diaspora,
like kind of really uh kind of those you know people like many people were writing and thinking about work produced by diasporic figures and groups um and they were also thinking about the relation to not well home but you know the long journey um that they'd come on to get to the cities let's say so the relation to uh independent producers also all over the global south was at play in Channel 4. You know, Channel 4 was committed to, you know, bringing the intimacy of life of communities to the screen. You know, there were all kinds of great journalists,
and you know, there was, for me, there was a kind of, it was just such a kind of incredible scene of thinking where television Kojo and I have been thinking about for a long time and we will do it we're going to work we're working on this history of television a curatorial project that we're thinking we've titled the third parent this sense that the parent the television was like this third parent in the room which was you know maybe another fireplace But the sense that this third parent could actually educate you, and you'd come back from a party at two in the morning or clubbing and you'd turn on the TV and Stuart Hall would be there on Open University.
I think when it comes to self-instituting and the fight for the idea of what it means to be public now, I think what I admire about that time was that people were thinking about class. they were not just trying to... I mean, one of the consequences of what you described in relation to the financialization of education is that there's been a kind of almost cynical production of knowledge in that students are clients, they are kind of what I call, they are kind of thinking with a smart, efficient knowledge as opposed to thinking... because
world is as it is and maybe the world demands that they are that that that this kind of smart knowledge but um and i could go on and on about that but i'm i'm interested in how class and what a public is now um in relation to the diversity of platforms within which one can um distribute But I still think a curriculum needs to be in place, if you like. There still needs to be clear curriculums. And what I like about this time, as I keep saying, was the friendships that people had with each other.
The black arts movements in the UK were exciting. The fact that there was a generation before me and Kojo, or two generations of writers and thinkers and filmmakers and musicians and artists, that gave us a history within which to work from and towards. you know, it was like there was no other future for us than in a way what we are doing now. But I'm always thinking about this question of a curriculum. Great. And that I guess leads into my next question about you have this new platform,
platform, the pedagogical platform, the Department of Xenogenesis. Could you tell us a bit about what that is and what that entails? Kojo, do you want to start? Yeah, I guess part of it, one way of thinking about it is that the figure you can see behind of course, Octavia Estelle Butler. These days, I think Octavia Butler is really, she's very popular these days. People read her writings a lot. I've been teaching a seminar in Geneva on her writing for a number of years now. And each year I sense the growing appreciation
and understanding of her work and her thinking her writing. And so naming this recent exhibition Xenogenesis is really designed to to say what if, what does it mean to embark on a xenogenetic thinking? What does that look like? And part of it is that not only do we have her novels and her short stories, but we also have generations of feminist thinkers who've engaged with Otamie Butler's thought. So part
of it is about inviting those thinkers into dialogue. You know, so you have a thinker like Denise Ferreira da Silva, who's not a literary scholar. She's a philosopher. But at a certain point, a philosopher such as Denise Ferreira da Silva will turn to Octavia Butler, will turn to Kindred, or to Wildseed, or to Parable of the Sower. Why is that? It's because Octavia Butler represents a certain kind of political, some kind of aesthetic political imagination that is really,
that in a way makes good on what the promise of science fiction is and hardly ever achieves. So that her thought experiments really push past and open up the frontier imaginary of so much imperialist science fiction. And it makes her a go-to figure for generations of feminists. So part of what DXG is at its most simple is a series of conversations around Octavia Butler Butler as a thinker of the inexistent, as a thinker of the perspective, as maybe one
of the most important political science fiction thinkers of the present. So a figure who died in 2006, you know, I've read so many articles about the prescience of Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, so many articles about how she envisaged 45, how she has these characters with this slogan, Make America Great Again, but there's so much more to say, so it's about arranging certain conversations that start at that point and then keep going so that we can actually drill into and open out what it means to think with
xenogenesis and to keep going from there you know so um it's something uh that's been envisioned for a long time. I can see it. I can picture all of these amazing thinkers who continually turn to her work and now it's time to invite them in and have those conversations. So that's just one level of it that really excites me. I think also since we made O Horizon in Shantina-Katan based on Tagore's vision for this school,
it's a long story but you know for us this space Shantina-Katan is very much an experiment in decolonization towards transnationalism, but a contextual relation to transnationalism, and a contextual relation to the planetary. In that, Tagore brought back and Nandah Lalbos and other figures traveled across Asia and brought back all these votive objects which students would study and think with and almost meditate on and produce multiple experiments and relationships to towards those histories and towards those objects. I was thinking about
Césaire when he says in discourse on colonialism, we need a humanism made to the measure of the world and then thinking about the calculative temporal dead ends of capital prediction and thinking of the relation that Octavia has to prediction in that she's almost like a prophet. I mean her work has, I mean Kindred is almost about this entanglement with with a kind of a temporal binding, right? But I'm very interested in how prediction works
when you place different scales of relation together. And when you take measure of the world that one needs to take in order to think with the multiple scales that affect us. So I think the Department of Xenogenesis is also going to go into this at a later stage and start thinking on what prediction might be in relation to this thickening of time and the science fiction of the present and thinking about the different forms that that is taking.
Thank you. So maybe just one last question and then we'll, you can open it up to the audience for Q&A. We have a related clip. But say when we spoke before, you said that the videos you make are cinematic figurations that come out of theoretical texts. So I mostly just wanted to ask you to expand on this. And I was just thinking that it seems that the way that, for instance, Fred Moten appears in your work in Athema, or Sedia Hartman appears in Nucleus of the Great Union, is different from how these two figures appear in Arthur Jafa's work, or even how books of theory appear in Colleen Smith's work, or Xerox's appear in Kamila Janat
Rashid's work. So I was just wondering, when you're working with theorists and theoretical language, what are the formal challenges that the work presents to you, I guess because I was struck by there's this Adorno, Pardon Lectures on Negative Dialectics. He talks about, he warns against the aestheticization of philosophical and theoretical terminology, which he says it brings language and concepts to a standstill. And obviously your work does something different from this, but it does seem a hazard of working with these kind of like ornate texts. So I was wondering, you talk about the becoming lyric of theory and the poeticization of discourse. So I was wondering what's at stake in these two operations for you,
and what does the use of this material mean for the intelligibility of the theory and also for the intelligibility of the work? Yeah, I mean, I'm just going to say something very quickly about that. In relation to the becoming Lyric theory, for me I talk to and spend time with and read some of these figures that we admire like Denise Ferrer de Silva or Sadio Hartman or Fred or or Catherine Youssef and others, many people who do not even, who are not here anymore as well. But I also think of them in relation to poets like Dante Michaud who kind of appears
in Infinity Minus Infinity or a young artist who appears in Infinity Minus Infinity who touches moss in order to get a reading of the city and pollution and I think of a piece of music in relation as well. Maybe this is what a structure of feeling is, it's like you can see these resonances say that appear in many different ways through different people almost like channels, almost like entities, you know, and it's as we work within infinity minus infinity. For me, the idea that you know, there is this good object called a theorist and then there is this bad object
called some, you know, piece of music or whatever, that doesn't, I think we weave an entangled relation to let's say the resonances of say you know a the words that are uttered by theorists but almost to have them performed gives them a different valence it gives them a different power it gives them a different concentration you can take away the book you can take away the fact that they're in an academy. You can study the faces, you can study the way that somebody is uttering the words that they write, you can slow it down, you know.
You can focus on the grain of the voice, you can focus on the tempo of the voice, and there are many vocalities and there are many non-linguistic forms of thinking that relate. So maybe they just relate somehow, but they relate. And I think that this is, if you like, a kind of eminent language that you can only assemble when you put it together through, I would say, the performative rather than a documentary of people, a bunch of theorists speaking.
I think related to that, picking up from that, it's to do with the citational practice of the word. In the videos you'll see the closing credits are often quite long. They are effectively short videos in their own right. Some of them have been known to last 10 to 15 minutes long. I mean they're quite epic in their own right. And that's because they are citational. there is an effort to open out the work that the video is in dialogue with and is trying to contribute to.
And I think you could say that becoming Lyric of Theory is about choreographing those citations in the way that Anjali has pointed out. choreographing the polyvocality of those citations within the video itself. I mean figures such as Fred Moten, Sadir Harman, figures such as Renee Gladman, Naylor Hopkinson, John Keane, Karnisa Lubrin, these figures are already working on the becoming lyric of theory they already um have that um complexity built into their work that's to say
they already collapse the distinctions the hierarchy between creation criticism and curation the uh this the kind of the disciplinary hierarchy is suspended And that's something that's very inspiring. It's something that the work aspires to, to lift that disciplinary ascription of roles between criticism, creation and curation. And so the becoming lyric of theory is a means of suspending those distinctions.
And then it's also means of choreographing that suspension. Thank you so much. I guess maybe, I don't know, Stella, are you fielding the audience Q&A? Hi. I can come on here for a sec. So we have one question right now in the Q&A box. Anyone else can submit additional questions, but I also posted it in the chat so you guys can see. This audience member asks, I wanted to ask about the particular form of the essay film,
which alludes to and aligns with the conjunctural left-wing histories your work is concerned with and longer history of this aesthetic to produce the juxtapositions and register the dialectics that you've both mentioned. I am curious, is the essay film slash will the essay film be the primary mode you'll work in or do you see yourself working in other forms of media? I wonder what forms excite you? I mean the essay film isn't done yet, I mean it can be anything so it's for us it's it's an ongoing invention
But, you know, we work curatorially as well, so we think a lot about how to transmit ideas in different spaces that are not only existing inside screens. We make different installations as well, work with photography and collage and montage, collages and all kinds of different things. And performance. So, you know, there's lots of things we want to do. um one of them is a car as a car is a car chase um and uh um which i'm not going to talk much
more about but i think it's uh we really want to work on a car chase just to really uh get into the energetics of that kind of genre um but uh yes sonically as well um there are many projects um that we want to work on so Kherja what do you think? I mean part of the essayistic part of the the uh the impulse of the essayistic is this capacity to suspend the disciplinary obligations that I just suggested so it offers this capacity to suspend the distinction between
creation, criticism and curation. It promises that, whether it fulfills that is up to you, but I think in a post-cinematic context, clearly the essayistic will undergo and is undergoing continual transformation. So a work such as Glissant Bot, which is a Twitter bot, it's a bot that tweets out four Glissant quotes every hour, 96 Glissant quotes a day, and has been doing that since 2017.
So by now it's clearly, you know, this kind of, it's clearly an epic project measured out in words and syllables. So there are these projects which appear to be outliers but are in fact about taking certain ideas and moving them outside of a specific screen context and making them operate differently. I mean the question of which forms excite, very often it's, what is very exciting is when you hear or think about a term,
but it has a certain neologistic quality to it. So what that means is thinking about a term or a phrase or hearing a phrase at a moment when its meaning is prospective and proleptic rather than retrospective and already given. already given. So there are certain moments where very often what happens is you'll hear a phrase or you'll hear the title of something and instead of going to see that play or that film or that music you will just stay with the title. So you'll like for example six characters in search of an
author. I've never actually seen that play because the title is more than enough. The title is enough to just to just give you total like visions all the time. So it's not that I don't want to see Pirandello, it's that it's that the neologistic force of the title is more than enough. So it's It's not so much forms as the precipitative and generative capacity that certain neologisms, which are not only verbal, they're also visual or sonic. You know, like Julie Moreton's paintings, those are painting, those are visual neologisms,
right? Like a lot of the marks that she makes. That's part of why they're exciting. So I would say that's, I would say, you know, it is the new logistic capacity of forms that is exciting, not forms per se. We have one more question here, if you, if you all feel like. Oh yeah. Okay, this audience member asks, this relates to your upcoming retrospective. I am curious about how your relationships with creation, curation and criticism have
developed over time. How your gloss of neologisms makes you think about, think of your retrospective differently? That's a great question because in fact we don't call it a retrospective. For us it's a cross section. what we did was take eight works from the past 11 years out of many works, out of 17 or 18 works or something, we took a very specific selection and then worked with a designer, a great designer, designer, Diogo, to conceive new dispositives, new displays for each of them.
And in that way, we really wanted to sidestep the notion of retrospective and in a way make a cross-cut across the last decade of work. And in a way we wanted to build in neologisms into the display, so we made Diogo go away and read the Xenogenesis trilogy, and being a designer he enjoyed the moments where the Owankali's furniture comes out of these walls, So he, from his reading with Octavia Butler, he started designing effectively environments for
the works, new environments for the works which made the works themselves have a certain neophiliac quality to them, such that you could imagine that they were eight works made by eight different artists, none of which are ours. Yeah I mean yes to, I think it was very strange to see all the work together to be honest um and I think we know Scott Garlinger from another event we've done, I'm not quite remember right now but um i think it was quite strange to see all the work together because uh they do uh
each work is very different and has very different set of parameters and research and you know formal challenges and um locations uh you know i think this kind of upsets people about the work because people respond to different works as opposed to respond to the actual practice. And they write about different works or think about different works as opposed to the practice. And I think what the exhibition has done is it forced a relationship to the practice. and we were very insistent on that and you know in relation to asking people who are writing for
the new book to think about that and I realized it was quite a challenge because it's funny how writers have their politics and their areas of interest and they think very little in a way about location of where maybe artists are from in some way and of course Otolith was a way to stop people asking us where we are from and ask us more complicated questions about weightlessness and stuff like that but I realized that we would not be anything if we had not been born and brought up in London, you know. London has given us a kind of resilience to bullshit
around representational value that I really appreciate and it's given us this you-ness which I really like about, I mean I hate it about myself but I also like it about myself and i like it about koja and i like it about the practice um and i think it's you know i saw a lot of instances uh where the idea of a practice coming directly from somewhere as boring as might seem as boring as london or as exotic as calcutta or exotic as i don't know um i don't know somewhere else in the global south that became very fashionable I think just various conflicts
made certain artists very fashionable but then I started realizing that actually the diaspora as you know diaspora kind of left stranded without people really writing or thinking about the practices that come out of the imperial centers we talked about this with Ed Halter at Bard when we did a conversation with him a couple of weeks ago, we were thinking about what New York and London and Calcutta have in common as kind of sites of sort of imperial intensity. So, you know, I'm interested in Kojo calls it aesthetic justice and I kind of think of it as a kind of of resilient aesthetic that finds ways to produce some, yes, maybe deepening neologisms, just
deepening that process. But it'd be great to hear from more of you if you're out there. I can see a few people we know somewhere in the names, but if not. It looks like Felicity Scott has a hand raised. Oh. I don't know if the question needs to be typed into the chat or how it works technically. Oh, does it, I think she can unmute herself or can we unmute her or?
Sarah, you might have to have to step in and figure that one out. Okay, apparently talking for minutes. But Felicity's muted right now. I was just wondering maybe, oh yeah, it looks like Felicity says it was an accidental hand raise, but I gave thanks. But I was wondering just from talking with Kylie, who's on the
chat tonight just about the Autolith group and the Autolith collective and this naming convention and then also your status as on the one hand a fictive collective that's also a real collective. How do these, do you distinguish between these two? Yeah, the collective is curatorial, experiments with the curatorial, collaborations with the curatorial, and the group is everything else. And the name, the kind of, the gesture of nomination is both
real, you know, because they really are people, they really is an ultimate group. But clearly it also has a para-nominational quality to it because it has this capacity to multiply and to mobilize and to move. So I think it moves, it gathers forces of the fictional or forces of fabulation and
It also is a kind of a trap, kind of a decoy, kind of a displacement tactic, which Anjali pointed to very clearly which is that it's designed to send people down a track, a certain track rather than other tracks, you know. So there is a kind of tactical deployment of, I guess, you know, people nowadays would call it a kind of tactics of opacity, you know,
or tactic of, you know, in transparency. But it's, you know, I think the artists of color always face an expectation of transparency and of a kind of propriety there's a kind of a strong notion of the proper in which artists of colour are asked often not necessarily verbally but sometimes verbally they're asked to deliver forms of certainty for their audiences and to their audiences and that the act of the gesture of
nomination is designed to both displace and disappoint that expectation of forms of certitude so it comes out of a heightened sense of the the obligations requirements presuppositions that that artists of color are asked to labor under. And it's just about shifting all of those quite playfully, you know, and it creates ripple effects.
You know, I know it does, because I've seen them operative. It creates interference patterns. That's what it's designed to do. And it does do that, because I've seen it at places like the Flaherty and all kinds of places, places with a very strong expectation of what kind of work you should be making under the sign of the political or under the sign of documentary or under the sign of crisis. You know, especially at those moments, creates large amounts of friction and that's what it's designed to do. I think the idea of a collective that I admired in the vision of Black Audio was the fact that
people's skills and non-skills and inabilities were all registered as skills, as you know, people supporting each other, amplifying each other's points, a kind of a vision of a sort of deep trust. But more importantly, the argument, you know, a series of arguments that you can see happen on the screen in the Black Audio Film Collective films. There is a deep sense of argument going on. But not only their films, in many other practices as well, where let's say independent
filmmakers, I could see coming out of third cinema and coming from India and coming from various different parts of Africa, were making and also, you know, Chris and Marker of course, were creating kind of arguments and you could see that in the work, the work was filled with conversations that they'd had and were having and were kind of exploring. conversations that are ongoing, to quote Stuart Hall, but the fact of a practice of being a collective is nothing but precarious. I mean, it's nothing but precarious. The so-called art world is not that actually fond of arguments.
And, you know, I think the neoliberal art world really enjoyed kind of the pedagogic turn as such. But it was very, I didn't see much heckling, I never saw much argument going on, you know, in the way that I expected because of course, you know, these are almost performances of pedagogy. So the idea of when Kojo and I started, there was no real, we didn't really know of any other, many other collectives apart from a couple, 16 Beaver in New York, and of course, you know, Critical Arts Ensemble, the Yes Men and NSK in Slovenia and, you know, maybe Kamoinge Collective in Harlem and, you know, and different groups, not necessarily in the art,
world but the but the it is like fred moten talks a lot about he talks up to me about you know the violence of collectivity and how it can be nothing but violence um but it should be a loving violence um because it's it's precarious it is it is it is pretty awful out there um you know there is a lot of assumption, sexism, you know, unbelievable amounts of operable operators operating within negative commons when you open up a space of commoning or gathering. There can be a lot of
negative forces that come with that, that come into your space that you open up and being a host is not always a nice role to be in because one is seen and blamed for being dominant and you know there are many 16 beaver are doing all these talks at the moment called friends of the viral renee and a rena sorry not 16 beaver um called friends of the virus and they've been talking a lot about the negative commons and analyzing how operators and operations work uh to actually destroy collectives and movements. And in Britain, you know, they're also not fond of movements or collectives or the idea of collective. They privilege individual
artists as opposed to movements, especially when it comes to Black and Asian artists. They will go to America for Blackness rather than really think of what that might mean in this context. in relation to, I would say, 200 years of the presence of cultural figures in this country from the global south. So it is a missed opportunity in Britain that is, again, one that we felt was important to ignite just as a almost performatively between ourselves as a proposition around collectivity after the death of I would say or the turn away from collectives and bands and groups and film
collectors and all this stuff that I was describing earlier towards a young British artist movement that privileged you know the spectacle of the great the great singular figure of the artist and the commercialization of the artists. That just felt so pretentious and we didn't really, we really wanted to just play with that I suppose and find a way to explore collectivity, not just for ourselves but for other people, for the work of other people that we felt would never be brought to into view. So there's that but then there's also the practice of making work which
is involves the the knowledges and the trust and the commitments to all these other people that we work with and keeping them alive as well and keeping them you know they're keeping their enthusiasm going because it is a practice with them as much as it is between ourselves. If we had tons of money I would be able to support all of them forever but it's not like that. So yes, I just wanted to point to the, let's say, some of the difficulties and some of the precarities of being a collective and in fact I could go on and on and on about it but I won't. Okay, I think we have one more question here, if you all are okay with it. This is coming from
Absolutely. This is coming from Brendan. Returning to some aspects of the question Kieran had asked regarding the making lyrical of theory, namely, are precipitive capacities, as Kojo put it, of on the one hand theory and on the other art of the same type, or to what extent would you deny this arguably disciplinary distinction? I'm curious in particular about the capacity of each to intervene at the level of politics." And I put this in the chat too. Okay, so the thinkers that I learn from, what I admire in their writing, what I aspire to,
is this, is in a way, narrated at the level of that phrase itself, the making lyrical of theory. That doesn't mean it's not a lyric that is then theorized and it's not a theory that is then made lyrical. both in one topological circuit, which means at a certain point they are indivisible from each other. That doesn't mean those figures can't then go and do theory as we would recognise
it, whatever that is, or they can't do lyric poetry. For me what it means is they, there is a certain kind of writing style which draws on certain kinds of figures of speech in order to make points which are clearly theoretically argued but are compressed into figures of speech such as you know Orlando Patterson the absence of ruins which he takes from a poem by Derek
Walcott. So it's a poem by Derek Walcott called The Royal Palms. This phrase occurs within this poem from 1962. It then gets taken up by Orlando Patterson to become the title of a novel in 67 and then Black Audio Film Collective adopt it to talk about their relation to archives, which they do not really talk about archives per se. They talk about the relation of the diasporic subject to the archive. The absence of ruins is the relation to that archive.
So now the absence of rune is a poetic figure that has been adopted in order to do the work of pointing to the discrepant relation, or the relation of dispossession and disinheritance of diasporic subjects to practices of commemoration and memo-technics. techniques. It's all condensed in that figure of speech and absence of ruins. And that's kind of what I'm talking about, where a figure of speech is doing the work, for me,
of a theoretical argument but in a compressed and enigmatic and not fully opened out. It's as if it's a theory that keeps, a theory that, it's as if it's a theory that closes in around itself to protect the pearl of its meaning. And it's a condition under which theory undergoes a transformation, a transformation which we call becoming lyrical.
So those are some of the things I'm just working it out myself because I read it in someone referred to it in terms of quite recent work but then I suddenly started thinking that nearly everybody I like going right back to a figure like I don't know Joseph Kaisley Hayford who's a kind of Ghanaian writer from the turn of the century who read this volume called Ethiopia Unbound which is about a Ghanaian intellectual in London at the beginning of the 20th century, you know, and it's, so it's moments of fiction and then moments of memoir
and then moments of fiction where the essay is inseparable from the fiction and so on. And that's the kind of thing I'm thinking of. But maybe Brendan, you can, you know, send us your thoughts about this because i'd like to hear because i have a feeling as usual with many things that preoccupy me i have a feeling that many people are thinking along parallel lines but using different terminologies to think about um parallel tendencies hi can you uh can you hear me Yes. Great. Yeah, thank you. Thank you very much for the answer.
I think really the, I guess the more operative distinction sort of internal to my question was really actually less the one between on the one hand theory and art, but more between conceptuality and aesthetics in the sense of being sensuous. And I think the question of lyric and poetry is obviously fascinating because it exists sort of in an ambivalent, obviously it's an art object, but it's also conceptual. And I guess what I'm curious about is in terms of your work seems to combine a very sophisticated
conceptuality but also with a clear, I mean, aesthetic element at the level of vision. And I guess I'm curious how you think the kind of actuality of that kind of sensuousness versus a certain conceptuality or whether you see them not to be so divided at all. I'm not sure if that's the clearest way to phrase the question, but that's the best I've got. Thank you very much. That's a really beautiful question. I mean it's a really beautiful elaboration of your question because I've been thinking a lot with the sensorial and you know how of course you know I was thinking a lot about
it in relation to kind of a resilient aesthetic but how to remain sensuous inside that resilience inside that resilience um or that maybe the shield is the sensuous um in a way uh the um we kind of literalize that i suppose in um infinity minus infinity where instead of going you know the montage actually goes through the senses um as portals towards a kind of thinking around you know what inhabits the inner consciousness of the of hearing or what is
inhabited inside the throat or what is inhabited inside the the fingernail inside the hand when it touches the earth or a tree or moss um i think i mean that's a huge question of like where does that sensuousness come from or you know where how does it how how is it kept maybe alive as a sort of practice I've been thinking a lot with and this might sound corny especially because it's such a terrible it's got such a sort of commercialized and I don't know ridiculous there's many ridiculous
aspects of it now in the commercialization of yoga but yoga means basically to bind to yoke the mind and the body in order to achieve a process of emancipation towards the unthought towards the unknown. And I think the practice itself opens up trauma as a physical sensation in the body, where you are confronted with everything that you store as pain physically, but that has a mental, that incapacitates you mentally as well.
And it's a deeply, when you do these various different poses, you are kind of deeply, you know, you start to go through this process of like concentration on all of these things, all of these psychic spaces of consciousness, which begin to kind of open up, I would say, limits of desire and the potential of desire. So I think Kojo and I also listened to a lot of music and for us we loved multi-instrumentalists and arrangers and works that could let's say we talk about structure of feeling a lot but let's say just move through many different arrangements
you know, and move into many different, and I think for us many different kinds of music help us to take the arc of a work and put it into many different states in which people can enter it at different points and ask different questions. I think the interesting thing about Covid has been that the work has been able to move around the world despite the fact that there's no, all the museums are closed and whatever. It's actually because it works at the level of the screen, it can work, many of the works can work on screens. And it's almost like a kind of expanded cinema
space that is being kind of created by the work itself, you know, as it sort of has moved around during this COVID moment. I continue to want to explore the sensuous as states of being, but I'm drawn more and more to states of horror and violence and states of confusion and states of sadness and states of the different states and multiple states and confusing states that we inhabit now. I don't think enough is done in relation to trauma and horror and you know
that is one of the sensuous states that I'm interested in personally. Maybe just to follow up on that, I think figures like These Are All Poets, and the question would be why increasingly does certain kinds of poetry do a kind of work that is increasingly compelling. So poets such as Rajiv Mohabir, Jay Bernard, Karnisa Lubrin, Dante Michaud, Harmony Holiday, you know poets of this caliber and with these kinds of writings,
all of these poets engage in what I'm calling the becoming lyric of theory. But more than that, I think they are all, they all work out ways to bring you in proximity to mortality and to death. That's actually, that's actually what I search for. Like that's clearly the under conditions of a pandemic. A pandemic has a way of sorting out art that is meaningful and matters and it has a way of
rendering huge amounts of art inoperative and pointless. It has a way of making most of the art market and the art world seem pointless, just beside the point. And it has a way of of bringing you face to face with a search for certain kinds of texts that can bring you in touch with the kinds of disproportionate sufferings that we are all aware of. And I I think certain kinds of poetic speech, and all of these poets would be examples of that,
have a capacity to bring you into relation with what the architect Adrian LaHood calls a congregation of the damned. They have the capacity to do that. And so poetry is becoming increasingly important. And these figures I mentioned would be key examples of that. Great. Unless you have further thoughts, Kieran, Anjali, Kojo, I think we could wrap
up here, if that sounds good. Yeah, we didn't make it to our next to our second clip, but we'll just have to hold that for our next meeting, whatever that will be. Yes, definitely. Thank you so much for joining us for this conversation and for being here. Thank you to our audience members for coming. And I wanna give a special thanks to Sarah O'Connell who is running all the tech for this event behind the scenes. Our next and final dialogues is going to be Sunday, May 16th at 1pm with philosopher Peter Osborne and Brendan Harvey.
So please join us for that and thank you again. Alright, good night. Thank you so much. Thank you to Jay. Thanks so much Stella. Thanks Sarah. Thanks Jay. and of course thanks Kieran. Yeah thank you Kieran. Let's do it again sometime. You know where to reach me, you know where to reach Angel Eagle. Let's do it again. It was a pleasure. Yeah, it was such a fun conversation. Thank you so much. Alright then. Have a good evening everyone. See you all soon.