What is the core of the group? Yeah, we've been making work together since the end of 2002. So we've been together about 10, 11 years. So the core of the group is videos, films, in the kind of essay film tradition. And then around that, we curate the work of filmmakers whose work we admire. And then we also work on editorial projects and publications. So the Otolith Group is a platform for all these activities. But at the core of it is a certain cinematic inquiry.
The SA film tradition has a time-travelling dimension to it and it also has a science fiction quality to it. You can see that in Sansa Leigh very clearly, the man from the 41st century who is lost forgetting. And in this case, in the Year of the Quiet Sun, that's exaggerated because the images we are looking at are postage stamps and the central idea is that these postage stamps are the last remnants of a visual culture, of a particular political moment
which was destroyed and so in the year The Quiet Sun is looking back at the years between 1957 and 1966, when the colony of Gold Coast became the independent nation of Ghana, led by this charismatic revolutionary figure, Kwame Nkrumah. And in those nine years, they pursued this very vigorous cultural policy of Pan-Africanism, which is a kind of continental consciousness. bound up with the liberation of all the different countries, and then trying to create different frameworks for continental independence.
The idea being that the independence of one country means nothing without the independence of the entire continent. And so in the stamps of this era, you see this policy visualized and summarized, miniaturised and projected. So you see an epic political project, which actually really continues throughout the entire 20th century. Before the independence era, you had many congresses, but they always took place in European countries because they weren't allowed in African contexts. So you had congresses in Brussels, in Paris. It's only after 57 that you get congresses happening in Egypt and then you have them in Ghana as well.
And in the stamps you see these kind of the theoretical discourse of Pan-Africanism, which takes on a policy dimension and then becomes in stamps, it becomes a calendar, a political calendar which is celebrated. And the stamps show this in this compressed, condensed form. and after 66 there was a military coup and the first thing that the generals of this coup did was destroy all the visual culture of this nine-year period. So if you go to Ghana today, there's still some architectural monuments, but there is no visual culture and there is no memory. But the visual culture survived in these stamps. There you can see it intact, but missing its context.
So you have a calendar but no memory of what the calendar links to. So we really wanted to return to these stamps and examine them, both for their indexicality, because sometimes when you have a postmark, you can actually see the time passing. You can see the date. You can see 9am, 5th of March, 1957. You can see it there. But then when a stamp is mint, when it's never used, it's somehow in some suspended state of animation, which it's forever 1957. So between this temporality of the indexical time and this suspended animation of a kind of eternal time,
the film can move backwards and forwards between these two states. we um we went to specialist websites and you enter the country and the year that you're looking for so you enter in ethiopia 1961 and there they come and then you locate the stamp you want a particular stamp which indicates a building called africa hall where the first organization of Avcon Unity. Congress happened in 63, a giant building, and you click on that stamp and you make a bid for it. There's a collector and the collector says,
you know, this stamp costs three euros. So you bid three euros 50. And then you have to wait maybe three days for the auction to end. And then into your email comes a notice. You have won this stamp. then you pay for it by paypal and then a few days later it arrives and the stamp is wrapped up in transparent paper and then the paper is sandwiched between two bits of cardboard and then the cardboard are wrapped up in a piece of paper giving you the the details of the stamp and then all of that is in an envelope of course with more stamps and these come from all over the world so we were ordering stamps from from india from canada from russia from australia i mean just from everywhere
so they would come in and what we liked about them is that um these stamps are somehow locked in the world of specialist collections and i have no particular interest in the world of collectors stamps can be i find them quite pedantic and fiddly and you know i don't like the tweezers and the magnifying glasses. I couldn't really care about any of this. But when you have a project that is somehow greater than the stamps, this charges them with something that becomes really compelling. So we would get them, and then it became a question of sequencing them so that they begin to tell or begin to indicate fragments
from a larger narrative. and stamps, you know, they're indexical and iconic but they're not narrative they actually stop narratives because they actually stop time so we would create this geography out of these times and the question then became how to move from stamps to footage so the film is continually going backwards and forwards so it becomes a geography in that it starts it starts in the Gold Coast on the eve of independence. So it starts with stamps of George VI and Queen Elizabeth. Then it goes to Ghana and it reveals that these stamps created in Ghana were not created in Ghana at all.
They were designed on Wall Street by a company called the Ghana Philatelic Agency, which is a New York-based company, which still exists to this day. Now it's called the Interphilatelic Agency. and this agency commissioned 22 designers from all over the world from Hungary from Israel from the UK and it was the designers that made the stamps but they made them according to the policy of the government so that's a fascinating story of kind of production and design thinking and what you get is a kind of we call it a pan-Africanist pop art because you get these repeated design elements, stars, the outlines of the continent, the outline of the country of Ghana within
the outline of the continent, and then quite inevitable and familiar tropes, doves, laurel wreaths, eagles. So these very archetypal images of peace and of freedom and liberation. And in this sense, stamps are quite childish. They have such a limited space that they have to visualise complex political doctrines as single images. You see the dark side of a political context through its relentless focus on its optimism.
And we like these qualities. Stamps are also the front end of global infrastructures. At the very beginning of the film, you see these stamps from the era of George VI. So the stamps come from 1949, and you see this phrase, the Universal Postal Union. And this is a corporation that began in Bern in Switzerland, and which still exists. And they really created the first standards for postage. And now they're part of the UN, and every country is obliged to join the UPU.
and every four years the UPU has a congress and this means that every country who belongs to the UPU has to print a stamp which depicts the monument of the Universal Postal Union which you can still find in a park in Bern and the monument is of a goddess sitting on a rock and then next to the rock is a giant globe and pushing the globe forward are these four slender naked figures like flying through the air, pushing the globe forward. And so this is clearly a kind of 19th century vision of global communications. And so you get these moments where stamps continually display their own capacity to travel.
so exactly stamps are a government art form they're a kind of functional form so they have very little to do with art in the sense that we tend to understand art as critical or transgressive or questioning they're quite the opposite of that there's something like miniaturised monuments They're something like abbreviated history paintings. They are art as a form of power, standardisation and infrastructure. And they become compelling precisely for those reasons,
for their anonymity, for their mass distribution, for their mobility and for the way they travel underneath our attention. The Stamps return us to this moment when the atomic peace of the Cold War, the standoff between the great powers of the USSR and the USA, was designed to capture all political space and to close down all options. and so from 1955 onwards with the Asian African Conference at Bandung in Indonesia written about by Richard Wright in his book The Colour Curtain
you start to see a series of conferences and congresses that are designed to create and to hold open a space in which all the newly independent nations can hold open a space that is distinct from either of the great blocks. And the aspect that really interests me in that is the idea of creating a kind of a Pax Africana, an African piece that is separate from a Pax Atomica, from an atomic piece. As you analyse the Bandung Conference, the All-African People's Conference of 58 the Accra Assembly Conference of 62
the Casablanca Conference of 61 the OAU Conference of 63 as you look at them you realise they're all animated by this the way in which the Cold War and decolonisation and empire overlap you realise that the great powers detonated nuclear bombs on the sites of former colonies so you can see how France detonated its bombs in Sahara but you can also see how Britain detonated its bombs in Australia you can see how America detonated its bombs in New Mexico and you can see how the Soviet Union were testing their bombs in Nevaeh Zemlya which is one of the furthest points in the Soviet Empire
So in each case, there is this usage of either former colonial spaces or former Native American or Aboriginal spaces. And so there's a direct link between colonised bases, nuclear testing, and the peace of the so-called metropoles. and the project to disengage colonial space from this kind of murderous atomic peace was a huge project which I think is not really understood so much anymore but it's really compelling to me how to think Cold War and empire together
in terms of something like a technoscience and in some ways the project was successful Well, in other ways, maybe some of the countries underestimated how insistent and how treacherous colonial power could be, how the desire for colonial revenge could be so extreme. So the Congo crisis of 60, 61 onwards, that indicates how a kind of murderous coalition of the CIA, the United Nations, the US, Belgium, the mining company Union Minier in the Katanga province,
how this coalition of forces could roll back liberation. And then when you realize that the uranium for Hiroshima and Nagasaki was mined in the Congo and then shipped to America to be developed in lab laboratories and then to become a payload that's dropped over Japan. you