Hi, I'm Ed Halter, along with Toby Haslett. I wrote this month's pair of cover stories on the Otolith Group, and I'm here speaking with Kojo Eshin and Angelica Sagar, who are the Otolith Group. Hi. Hi. Hi, Ed. Hi, Ed. Let's talk about the cover, which is an image from Sovereign Sisters. I just wonder if you can maybe say a little bit about Sovereign Sisters and what you thought about seeing that particular work pulled out of your wide repertoire. I mean, Sovereign Sisters is is it's not a digital video.
So it stands in a very particular relation to our work. It's a point cloud. So you send out, you take a 3D scanner and you send lasers towards this monument in a park in Bern in Switzerland, and then you composite the information, and then what you see is the volume of information of this monument. And it's fascinating because what the monument speaks of is this kind of imperial desire to plan the planet, to plan a kind of global communications network. That's really what
this monument is. It's a monument to the kind of the desire to project a global postal communication system that can wrap around the planet. And it's how you envision that network in terms of the kind of imperial fantasies of the continents as naked women, the globe made of bronze, rocks of granite, and all of that situated in an artificial lake guarded by the goddess of Bern. So what we've done is take this kind of imperial monument with this kind of racialising vocabulary,
and then used the language of digital animation to create a kind of spectral spectacle of this kind of unseen, unsuspected communication network. A network that most people could not point to and could not name, but which nonetheless continues working away behind the scenes, you know, to this day. I mean, I think it's also, I mean, Sovereign Sisters is not alone as a piece of a standalone work, but it's attached to In the Year of the Quiet Sun and Statecraft, you know, which draw from the kind of the matter of the postal politics in relation to a distribution network
and the stamps that were produced in 56 countries at the moment of those countries got one independence in the continent of Africa. So, and the distribution network that postal unions were part of that allowed for these emblematic, this emblematic moment to kind of be distributed all over the world. and the kind of sense of the magnification of that, those moments in the politics they implied and the images they produce in the Year of the Quiet Sun. So it's part of a triad of works, you know, but it's interesting to see it kind of on its own there
on the front of Art Forum. Yeah, and I was gonna say, I mean, this is also something perhaps particularly informed by Britain, I think a lot about John Grierson's understanding that the post office is a communication system, you know, is something that always sticks with me, that that is how he understood the post office. And it seems that we're back there now again. Absolutely. Absolutely. And Lumumba was a policeman for a while. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Patrice Lumumba, Pertice Lumumba worked in the postal system. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote about Lumumba as a postman.
Lenin talked about the Soviet state learning from the postal system. Ayn Rand talked about the postal system as this communication network. And Tagore Rosa Blake wrote the post office. So yeah, I think it's clear that, you know, when you thread that line, It's clear that all of these figures understood the postal system as some kind of potentially planetary network, which both seems to promise utopia, but which clearly delivers a capacity to bind and inscribe and underwrite communication itself.
itself. And that seems to lead straight to like a neo-fascist like mask. It also makes me think how much the internet is built on the postal system as well. You know, we think of like, you know, early nautical packets, like the whole idea of the packet trade as a form of the postal service now becomes packet switching. And I mean, Even in the point of, I don't know about in Europe, but in the US, there are telegraph lines that were built along the original lines of the Pony Express or similar kinds of things. And then those lines get built over as the internet lines. So we are literally using some of the same routes that we use for the social service. Sometimes routes that are very, very, very old.
you know exactly i mean mahan's point is that uh mahan makes one brilliant point which is that of course the internet aggrandizes itself in the idea and the image of the cloud sovereign sisters points to this monument from 1907 which aggrandizes postal communications as goddesses circulating a continent circulating a planet excuse me so this move from the goddesses circulating a planet to the contemporary imagination of the cloud in a way what we've done is situate ourselves using the point cloud the work is it's kind of bringing this early 20th
century language of imperial patriarchy architecture and forcing it to speak to this language of the digital cloud and so a language of derealization a language of denaturalization actually seems necessary in order to get us to perceive and to concentrate on a mode of power which is continually withdrawing from sight. You know, there's a certain mode of power that doesn't want to be named and that trades in opacity and trades in spectrality and hides in the shadows. And sometimes you need an opaque language to name an opaque system of power.
So that's part of what's going on with Sovereign Sisters. And it's kind of overwhelming to see it, you know, frozen in motion forever on the front cover of the May 2022 edition of Art Forum. I mean, I was just thinking what a really wonderfully rare opportunity this is to talk about a piece of writing after I've written it, because normally writing writing, it just goes into the void and you kind of, you know, people read it, but you don't get, you know, even in today's internet age, the amount of actual response you might get is fairly limited. So, and I certainly never discuss it with very much with the subjects afterwards.