Welcome everyone and thank you for joining us for Instant Ancestry Home and History Through the Black Archive. It's a brand new program of experimental documentary short films by Black filmmakers that upend identity and perception. This program is presented by Black Docs and the Maisel's Documentary Center so thank you for joining us for our Q&A with the Otolos group. My name is Curtis Cesar John, I'm with the Luminal Theater. And I'm Christopher Everett with Speller Street Films, and we're the founders of Black Docs. We started Black Docs to help build an authentic documentary film culture within the African-American community through film screenings, webinars, and interactive film events.
Instant Ancestry draws on a wide range of archival material with eight films that attempt to cohere questions of Black identity that have been obscured, suppressed, or erased by white supremacy and other dominant forces. Revealing a tension between what's been captured and more tellingly what's been excluded, these films move seamlessly between personal and political, between family albums, home movies, text correspondences, official documents, news clips, historical footage, and advertisements. They render the archive as a site of both presence and absence. And so today's presentation is the Autolos Group's 2013 film in the year of the quiet
sun. From 1964 to November 1965, the nation states of the world issued postage stamps to commemorate the first scientific expedition to study the sun. As the stamps turned their face towards the sky, they overlooked the unstable land of Africa's newly independent states. With a focus on Ghana and its new leader, the liberator, Kwame Nkrumah, the film is entirely composed of found material including archival footage, scanned and magnified post-it stamps and anamorphic national themes and music. A little bit more about the Otulus Group before we dive into our discussion. The Otulus Group was founded in 2002 and consists of London-based Angelique Saga and Kojo Isshun. Its work is research-based and spans the moving image,
audio performance installation and curation. Incorporates filmmaking and post lens based essayistic aesthetics that explore the temporal anomalies, anthropic conversions, and synthetic alienation of the post-human, the inhuman, the non-human, and the complexity of the environmental conditions of life that we all face. Thank you both for joining us. Thanks for joining me. You're so cool. We're going to hand this Q&A off to Ine Prakash and Emily Apter from Maisels. And we'll see you all next week for our November 17 Q&A with our remaining Instant Ancestry filmmakers. Thank you so much, Curtis and Chris.
My name is Emily, and I'm one of the programmers at the Maisels Documentary Center. For those of you who aren't familiar with the organization, we're a nonprofit documentary cinema and education center in Harlem founded by the filmmaker Albert Maisels, filmmaker of Gimme Shelter, which we were talking about earlier. And so normally we would be operating out of our space in central Harlem, which is a micro cinema. We also have several education programs, all of which is happening virtually right now. So feel free to check out our website, maizelis.org, to see all of the documentaries that we're streaming right now and to learn more about our education programs, which are also have
transitioned to remote learning platforms. So I'll just mention that maybe everyone who's tuning in knows this, but Instant Ancestry as a whole is going to be streaming on our platform starting today for the next two weeks, but In the Year of the Quiet Sun in particular is only streaming one time this evening at 7 o'clock Eastern Daylight Time. So if you want to check out the film, especially if you enjoy today's conversation, make sure to catch it this evening. And then as Chris mentioned, there's going to be an additional filmmaker Q&A on Tuesday. And lastly, before I turn it over to Anae, if you have questions as we're talking, feel free to put them into the chat or enter them in
the Q&A function and we're going to open it up for audience questions towards the end, so we'll try and get to everyone's. I think that's it, so I'll turn it over to you Anae. Thanks Emily, I'm Anae, Thanks, Christopher and Curtis. I'll just add that Kojo and Anjali also run the Ottoleth Collective, a curatorial practice, and they've been influential in critically introducing particular works of artists such as Chris Marker, Haroon Farroki, Anand Patwardin, Etel Adnan, Black Audio Film Collective, Sue Clayton, Money Call, Peter Watkins, and Chimarenga in the UK, US, Europe, and Lebanon. The The Autolith Group's upcoming engagements include Xenogenesis, their solo exhibition,
which will travel to Southern Alberta Art Gallery in Lethbridge from September 26th to November 15th, and the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin from February 11th, 2021 to June 20th. I will also add that the Otolith group is an Aries as a collective, that there's some contention here that they're possibly a more Pisces, Gemini entity in Scorpio Rising. But thank you, Kojo and Anjali so much for being here. Thanks for inviting us. I'll start by sort of just generally asking about how you came to the film. We, of course, took the inspiration for the name of our series from the film using the phrase instant ancestry, which you attribute as a power of the stamp, perhaps somewhat winkingly.
I have here an example of stamps that are similar to what you use in the films. I found these on eBay. If anyone hasn't seen the film yet, these are Indonesian stamps. These are from 1955, the Bundang Conference, and these are from commemorative stamps from 10 years later. How did you first discover these stamps and what made you think that they would be an interesting inroads into exploring Ghana's independence in the subsequent coup? Okay, maybe I'll kick off and then Andrew can come in any time. Just jump in any time. There was an open invitation from an institution in Berlin called the House of World Cultures.
They were doing a large-scale exhibition on the relation between pan-Africanism and pan-Asianism, taking the Bandung Conference in 55 as a starting point. So they were like, we want you to do something, do whatever you like. And so we began researching and one day I came across an essay by an American professor called Kenneth Wilburn. The essay was called Africa to the World. And he analyzed all the postage commemorative stamps issued by the state of Ghana between 1957 and 1966. And so he did this kind of historical analysis.
And it was an impressive essay because he worked out that these stamps were part of a political project in which the national independence of Ghana is linked up with the international liberation of the continent of Africa. But there was a problem. His essay was very celebratory. It was kind of one long celebration of the design values of the stamps. And they are compelling. They are a certain kind of dynamic pop art. But for us, the stamps had a kind of more complex valence. Because when you visit Ghana, as you did in 2013,
you very quickly realize that apart from Black Star Square and Monument Arch, apart from these very specific monumental architectures, There's very little material culture of the First Republic, Nkrumah's Republic of 1960 to 1966. And there's very little evidence of the Convention People's Party, the party that Nkrumah formed in 1949 that led Ghana to independence, led the Gold Coast to independence in 1957. And that's because there had been a coup in 1966, a coup d'etat in which the in which sections of the military sections of the police had joined
together with covert covert assistance from the cia as usual to overthrow the cpp and to install a government that was um frankly neoliberal so we always say that neoliberalism neoliberalism began in different times and different places. In Chile, of course, neoliberalism begins in 73. In Europe, you know, it's 1979. But in the continent, it's 66. Because the first thing that the army and the police did was letting the IMF and gain loans from the US. So, and the other thing that the new, the 66 military coup did was destroy all the material culture
of the Nkrumah era. So all the public culture, the visual culture was gone. But when you looked at the stamps, because the stamps were circulating globally, so when you issue postage stamps, they don't just, you issue new stamps every year, you issue new commemorative stamps on different occasions, but you don't stop issuing them, you just let them run out. So this meant that once the stamps ran out, they entered onto this secondary market where they became stamps, which you could no longer use to send messages with, but which you could trade. And so when you go online, there's this entire digital
online market and uh and so following kenneth wilburn we went online and found using ebay this huge this huge number of stamps that you could buy and so we started to think what if this is the last example of really existing material culture of the nkrumah era because these were stamps issued during the era. So that means the stamps in 2014 are stamps from 57. They're both historical, they're indexical, they're iconic, and they're iconographic. So they become survivable images. So they have a lot of melancholy to them. They are remnants of a project of national
internationalism, of Pan-African socialism, which was interrupted, terminated, and destroyed. They're monuments to the political imagination of Pan-Africanism. And so what we liked about them was that they were very small items that spoke to an epic political project to change the continent and thereby change the world. And all of this in the small scale of the stamp. So once we understood this, we bought these stamps and then we tried to reconstruct a political calendar around them, because it wasn't just that they just issued stamps because
they liked them. The Ghana, the specific ministry that issued the stamps tried to link them to specific holidays and specific political conferences and specific political events. So the stamps linked to the conferences. The stamps commemorated the conferences and the conferences, in a way, entered into this kind of feedback loop with the stamps. So in other words, what we tried to do from the stamps was reconstruct the timeline and even more the value system of the Pan-Africanist project, because it's the value system that's being destroyed once the material culture has been destroyed.
So the whole project is a kind of reconstruction of the political imagination of that era from 57 to 66. I will go backwards a little bit in relation to your context, which is radical ancestry, to maybe give you a little bit of background on, I would say, the terms under which, or let's say the manifesto under which we elaborated our work, if that's of interest. Definitely. When you talk about radical ancestry, it is a good place to start because I think when Kojo and I met, we bonded out of many things.
but one of them was the relationship our families had had to two kind of independence movements. The way that my grandparents, my mother and father were more like Rushdie's, midnight's children, so they were born with at the moment of independence, but my grandparents were more on my mother's side. On my father's side they were victims of imperialism, but on my mother's side they were acting against it actively. Kojo's, my grandfather was an economist working with congress and population, his studies, he was a Marxist and looking at population
obviously through a kind of lens of becoming independent and decolonizing and you know was very much involved with let's say the aegis of the non-aligned movement, the projects of the non-aligned movement and my grandmother was a feminist working as president of National Federation of Indian Women. So they came with a huge legacy and archive that I hadn't really looked at much before, it was just there. you know, didn't know what to do with it, felt kind of weird about it, didn't really fit with many of the other Asian experiences of people that I have in, you know, I know in the UK of my generation at the time. Kojo's father was also, he can tell you a bit more about that,
but he worked with, directly with Nkrumah, and his mother was also an educator. They were both, you know very much involved and came with that energy to out of that energy to the UK and Kojo and his brothers and sisters have been very much like driven by that energy I think in their work and in their lives and in their thinking for me and Kojo it was it was a way of thinking about this opened up the, let's say, the kind of imperial violence of, the pressure of imperial violence, where an imperial rule and imperialism as a fact,
an imperial art world in fact, where there was not really an interest in, at the time, in, in, you know, there was no world to care for, let's say. There's no world to care for, but just scattered enclaves and enclosures to protect. So it felt like, how do we intervene, you know, out of these enclosures, into this history, into history, basically, and think about, to talk about timelines, how to convene timelines that intersect and complicate and refuse and then seduce and then educate and then anger.
So we wanted timelines to intersect with the many different responses and feelings that can come out of the political sensibilities sensibilities that could come out of like observing these thinking in relation to time like that, which of course the essay film allows us to do. You know, our first work was in zero gravity with the Russian Space Agency and we performed 26 parabolic flights. It was a work looking at, I won't go into that right now, but just to say that the idea of being weightless allowed us to speculatively look at the planet as a system, you know, as a whole earth as such,
but also as a kind of, in a way, as a closed system that has destroyed the planet. So the figure in the film comes from the future and she speculates on the planet from afar. And And this allowed us to intervene in time in that it opened up everything from the center of the earth to the cosmos. And of course, thinking with futurity and Afro-futurity, which was very much, Kojo was very much a thinker that brought these terms into view in relation to sound and sonic practices. This also allowed us to think with science fiction in a way that also helped us to intervene in the materiality of time, but also in the psychic pressures that are forced by imperialism.
So I think the sense of creating a practice out of this, it was a way of just thinking around, I would say, ways of working that occluded the categories of race into something that was more opaque, or let's say, questioned people's assumptions. at the time there were many artists in the UK of another generation whose work had come out of you know many struggles and many I mean it's such a such a great thing to have be a generation to have had a black art history here but we really wanted to the YBA moment that preceded us
the young British artist moment was really a kind of spectacle of the individual kind of neoliberal artist and kind of diluted or even just erased, I would say, a kind of 80s practice, practices of art, which really involved multiple different groups and collaborations between artists and filmmakers, many different collectives, kind of, I would say, a kind of political art that was, let's say, very driven by, you know, thinking around race and class and gender in a very intelligent and challenging way. So I think Kojo and I wanted to, you know, sing the song of the... Othlip was like a jubilant cry of the idea of the collective, you know.
Spivak talks about the jubilant cry of the World Social Forum, you know. I suppose we wanted to sing and bring into play this call towards collaboration. But also we knew that we could write about our work. We knew that people wouldn't necessarily get it, but we knew that we could also put our work into play. And that made it feel more like a kind of band as well. It made it feel like we could make concept albums and we could produce a kind of way of working
that took research really, I mean research is such a violent term, it comes out of you know so much imperial violence as well, but we're using it, but let's say we could absorb ourselves with many different ideas, music, filmmaking practices, theories, friends, conversations, which very much came from, was very much part of the practice as well, to have conversations with many people around the politics of these histories relating to non-alignment. So I think when it comes to the stamp, the essay film for us was very much linked to Antonio Gramsci's quote, where he writes from his prison cell that the starting point of critical elaboration
is the product of the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces without leaving an inventory. And I think the stamp was the first project which actually was a material trace, you know, that we could then put into our kind of sculpture of turning time around, but using it to do that. So my head is sort of spinning with thoughts and questions now. But I guess when we were used the term instant ancestry, which we of course borrowed from
your film, we were very inspired by the way that you used it sort of to suggest the limits of instantaneously retrieving or recovering a sort of lost ancestry or history and suggesting that the creation is an act of creation, an act of creation that comes out of speculation and fictionalization and sort of actively filling in the gaps. So I think hopefully maybe we can come back to talking a little bit more about the speculative nature of the film in a bit.
But I just wanted to ask about sort of the archive itself. In putting together the series, we were thinking a lot about not just the archive, but those sort of many forces, the material conditions, the social relationships that go into the production of visual culture, as well as the collection and archiving of images. and in your film we see several historical instances of the production of a new visual culture that you mentioned Kojo like at the Ideological Institute and at the agency in New York that's commissioned to to make the commemorative stamps and the coalition of artists that create the pan-Africanist aesthetic and then we also see how much of that visual
culture gets destroyed after the coup of 1966. So I guess I was hoping you could talk a little bit more specifically about your choice to include these, not just the images, but the way these images sort of came to be, and then how you're thinking about these many political forces, often very violent imperial forces that are sort of underwriting the archive that you're drawing off. Yeah, the, yeah, thank you. That's, I think it really speaks to the the heart of the project because, you know, everything, it's a post-cinematic project. That means you don't go out and film anything. So everything is made
at the editing table, the editing suite, Final Cut Pro, Adobe, an industrial scanner called ISIS. They had to change their name, of course. So we would send, we would buy these stamps on eBay, get them, isolate the part of the stamp that we wanted, then send those off to ISIS industrial scanners who would then bring them back at I think 320, not 720 DPI but the maximum DPI, like some massive magnification that our
domestic scanner could not even remotely achieve so they would, you know, you'd blow up a detail of a stamp to the size of a wall which is what we wanted. So this, what is at stake is this notion that everything you see is an image that has survived different kinds of political destruction. So everything you see is a fragment or a ruin. And that means it survives without its context, without its raison d'etre, without its reason for existence and without its value system. That's what it means to be a date without a calendar. From our side, the effort to magnify these images, the aesthetic is one of
a post-lens-based magnification on one hand, and then on the other hand, tinting. tinting every frame, every scene, so that you have a political colour, which is the colour of the present. All the footage is grey, washed out, low res, black and white. We, on the other hand, in post-production, we tint every scene in colours that resemble the types of colors you see in stamps. In stamps, they have these things called long sets. Long set is the full range of stamps,
from the cheapest to the most expensive. And the full set is called the long set. And so these two aesthetic decisions are what we use to bring these ruined fragments of footage and of stamps. It's what we use to create a double optic, so that you realise that the optic, the perspective on these archives, is a perspective of the present, and it's the perspective of the stamp's future. So it's a complex perspective in which you see the stamps in their historical indexicality.
You see the footage in its historical indexicality. You can tell the footage comes from 1958, the All-African People's Conference of 1958, the first Pan-African conference to be held in the continent, which my father attended, age 20, as a young activist. He remembers meeting Patrice Lumumba. He says he was very thin. Patrice Lumumba, also, if you look closely, wears glasses somewhat like Buddy Holly, because it's 1958. Nkrumah was the old man. That's what they called him, the old man,
because he's already in his 40s or 50s by then. So, and we bought these bits of footage, 15 seconds, 20 seconds. We bought them from digital, from companies who have the digital rights to these newsreel footage, which is what they are. So what you have is this three level, three types of temporality, the historical time of the material, the contemporary time of post-production, and then the time of the future that has been cancelled, the time of the historical future of the stamps, which never happened.
You know, the stamps and the footage, because the footage is pointing towards the future of the United States of Africa. That's the project. The project is the total, project is one, the total liberation of the African continent. And then B, the unification of the contract of the continent under something like an African common market. Something like an African version of the European Union. That's what they wanted. Nkrumah wanted an African Union, which would function like the European Union. In fact, the reason we don't have an African Union is because the European Union, which was called European Economic Community, effectively blocked it, like right then, like just at the very same time.
And effectively, a lot of the French former colonies effectively chose to stay with France rather than sign up to the African Union. So part of what the video does is to reconstruct the path towards the United States of Africa, a path that we know is blocked in 66. But part of what the video does is to evoke that time as if it happened. so the futurity is like what if that future prospect of the united states of africa had happened while from the present we know it didn't but they don't like they don't know in 58 that it
won't happen they don't know in 1960 they will happen but on the other hand not that's why 1960 is so important because 1960 is where obviously Lumumba's project to unify the Congo is really important because Congo has more natural resources than any other country so Congo is the point of counter-revolution that's where the Belgians the Americans the British the Rhodesians and the South Africans all join together to create a counter-revolution which will stop and reverse the liberation of the continent. So now you won't get the unification of the continent and you won't get the liberation of the continent because the Congo is the, that's the turning point, that's the
fulcrum upon which the whole continent turns. That's why the video pays so much attention to the death of Lumumba, because his murder is one of the most fateful moments of the entire 20th century. The whole project of continental liberation goes into reverse at that moment. So the video tries to do two or three or four things at once. It tries to show the path, tries to show how it was destroyed, and it tries to imagine what would have happened if it had continued. And so, so it takes the idea of the ruined nation, the destruction of the archives seriously, takes
the idea of the archives as the surviving remnant of what was ruined. But it also takes seriously the fact that when the stamps are historically new, nobody knows yet what will happen. In 58, nobody knows what will happen in 1960. In 57, nobody knows what will happen. In 1960, nobody knows yet what will happen. I mean, it's not set in stone that Lumumba would be murdered, but he was. So, on one hand, it tries to show the fate, the fate of this project of the unification of the continent. On the other hand, it also tries to reopen the prospective imagination of what it felt like to progress towards it.
So it's both a look back, but it's also using the historical materials to look forward. And then it's also using the historical materials to look at the destruction of that prospect. So it's several temporalities operating at once. And that's what gives the video the peculiar structure of feeling, I think. Something Kojo wrote about this film and the stamps, he wrote, in travelling from fingertips to tongues to envelopes,
stamps can be understood as images in motion as opposed to moving images, as publicity images or cross-border images. And I think just to talk about something else that's behind the project of the stamps was this, again, this the fact that they operated within a communications network you know that was established by the postal union as the first global I would say network whereby you know images could travel across borders and carry with them you know I would say the weight of of sovereignty, but kind of, you know, next to the complexity of how that works within
an international space. So I think for us, there was this sense that the, I mean, there's a lot to say about that. But I think the idea was to how to produce, we were so interested in the aesthetics of these works, the way they articulate many different, let's say, projects, be they from creating dams to indexing plants to birds to the dream or this kind of vision of these different countries is and then all of the different people that
worked on these images. These are literally traveling images which come from such a sort of specific local and hyper local perspectives and then get to be shared with the world. So I think this was also a way to think about, again, about how an archive as such has already existed and has already been traveling between all of these kinds of imperial enclosures and within them, in a way, and how that story could be told. The idea of stamps as traveling images is so radical, especially when you consider their transmissions of a new ideology, right? An ideology that threatens the Western neoliberal project enough that, you know, America wants to meddle in it.
And, you know, Emily mentioned the Nkrumah Ideological Institute, which we see in the film as a specific site of production of images to express a new ideology and to study the application of that ideology to a new nation and a Pan-Africanist project. I wonder what your own working relationship is to ideology. Do you rely on a consistent ideology as a through line for your work? are there certain thinkers and concepts that form the bedrock of ideology for you? You know, at the end of the film, your thanks list is full of iconic figures. And I just wonder how you view ideology as a component of your own traveling images, so to say. I mean, there is a...
Koja, why don't you start on that? I mean, yeah. I mean, The Quiet Sun is actually the first of a cycle of works. There's four, and they all relate to each other. Quiet Sun begins, the next project is called Statecraft. That's like a 60 meter installation of all the stamps issued by all the African nations to commemorate independence. So it begins with Ethiopia. No, Liberia, excuse me. It begins with a stamp that commemorates the founding of Liberia, and it ends with stamps commemorating the formation of South Sudan.
And then there's a book called World Three, which studies the same timeline of independence, but through these commemorative envelopes which stands on them called First Day Covers. And then finally there's a work called Sovereign Sisters, which is a kind of digital animation of a monument to the Universal Postal Union, who is this kind of organization that sets up the infrastructure for global postal communication in Switzerland. These four works all speak to each other.
So I think the ideological fascination is with the force of, is the ontological question of what an image can do. What are the powers of an image? What are the capacities of an image? What can it do and what can it say? What are the ontological capacities of an image and a sound? What was it? What is it becoming? What might it do? maybe the political ontology of the becoming of what an image is.
So not an image as a fixed entity, but an image as a practice in motion. This relates to this question of instant ancestry, because one thing the stamps do is to create an impression of a past. So the nation of Ghana is a new creation. Ghana is an ancient empire in the Sahel. The real Ghana was a 13th century empire in the Sahel, in the north of Africa. But this Ghana is a new invention from 1957. But when you look at the postage stamps from 1957, it's as if it's been there forever. So instant ancestry is this, the way in which the stamps create the effect of a pre-existing reality.
Now, this effect can be used clearly for, this is a kind of preeminently ideological effect, which can be used both by revolutionaries and dictators alike. And this is the point of Stamps. They are not, people call them things like witnesses to history and ambassadors of history, but they're not. They're partisans. They are participants in history. They're not standing on the sidelines watching history. They're making history. They are direct partisans. They will do whatever you ask them to do and they will do it very effectively.
That's why, like in Biafra, in Nigeria, when Biafra breaks away from Nigeria and there is a vicious civil war, millions of people die. Biafra insists on issuing stamps. So why would you do that in the middle of a civil war with millions of people dying? Why would you insist on putting out postage stamps? Because Biafra wants the effect of being a nation. It wants the stamps to send the message to the world that Biafra is a nation with a long ancestry. Even though everybody knows Biafra is a republic which is broken away because it suffered pogroms from the rest of Nigeria.
Everybody knows Biafra has seceded because the Federal Republic of Nigeria has unleashed anti, has unleashed inter-ethnic conflicts. So the ideological power of the postage stamp, the postal ontology of the state, the postal politics of the postage stamp is quite powerful once you work on it in more detail. In fact, a figure like Patrice Lumumba, in fact, worked in the postal service of the Congo. There's a brilliant essay by Jean-Paul Sartre on the political thought of Patrice Lumumba. And the best moment is where Sartre spends a page analyzing Lumumba's political project for the unification of Congo
in terms of his understanding of the postal system. Then when you read a bit more, then you realize that Lenin, when Lenin talks about the formation of the Soviet Union, Lenin had two models for the formation of the Soviet Union. One was the electrification of the Soviet Union. The other was the postal system. So then you realize that the postal system, And of course, you've all had to endure the US election. So you all know all too well what postal politics means in 2020. I don't have to lecture any of you on that. But all I mean is there is a history to postal politics. There were these moments that we can see.
2020, remember in 1940, before he was a politician, and then Lenin at the beginning of the 20th century. So I would say what we are fascinated in is the force and the power and the threat of images and sounds, which doesn't mean you give up on images and sounds. It means taking them seriously enough to analyze them by means of images and sounds. That means images and sounds are too important to be left to politics. And it entails us intervening in images and sounds by using images and sounds.
Because images and sounds are clearly both a means of education, a means of aesthetic education, and also a means of statecraft. They are a fiction of the state. Images are used by states and corporations for all the evil that we are all too aware of. So I would say, yes, we are fascinated by the ideological power of images and sounds. Otherwise, I would say there's no point or purpose and being an artist. Any artist who says otherwise, I don't believe them. Or I just think they're
just deflecting and displacing. But the point is, you don't give up on images, because you know that they can do great evil. On the contrary, that's kind of the reason for taking them seriously in the first place. Sorry, Anjali, go on. Sorry for interrupting. I think you asked about some of the writers or some of the politics maybe that we are formed around in terms of ideology. And I think that Kojo talks about images and sounds with such you know the the enthusiasm behind I'd say what we do
is there is an enthusiasm there despite everything and I think that is what um I'm you know that's something that Otelis Group was a way to really kind of uh in a way stage our own like little our own academy you know like create something that we could learn through and put some borders not borders but I would say put some like just some points on a map you know or put some put something around us like a circle around us to sort of be able to let's say think with certain ideas. And I think the essay film, you know, allows one to move between
and between this idea of, you know, competing realities of what the world is, you know, from, you know, documentary being, you know, carries the weight of, you know, colonialism so heavily inside it and then all the arguments within documentary um which was very interesting to us um allowed us you know with the essay film and through filmmakers that we love like marker and black audio and many others um and anand patwaden allowed us to really think about how to open up these ideas of fiction reality but going back to a kind of earlier position around why and I think the energy behind the project at large was this sense that you are brought up
in Britain you experience racism viciously from a very young age and then you become aware of its you become aware of its violence and its structure but then you go somewhere else and you experience no racism at all you go to India or you go um coming to the states has obviously also kind of produced many different um uh um ways of thinking for me around race of course but you know definitely going from experiencing this burden of like heavy racism where you're brought up inside that to experiencing none or being observant of other kinds of racisms,
you begin to realize that you're living very much inside this capitalist fiction. and you are living within a racial capital, you know, a racial capitalism or like, you know, racial capitalism is at the heart of everything. So I think for me, it was making this project was a way of finding a way through all of this that could actually begin to look at the histories of the left, the histories of various different formations of struggle within many different places.
Well, I think for us in the beginning, it was led by the project. So we went to India and we made some work there and we were in Japan. And, you know, we obviously, sonically, the files are just open to so many different variations of practices where I think the idea of a struggle and a vision of finding an abstraction of and a language to find a way to communicate this as aesthetics obviously you realize involves an actual living embodied practice. It's not, and I think the zero gravity thing for us was the first moment of that because for us it was like okay let's put our bodies into this
weightless space. So it was almost like let we have to be as brave as possible in finding a language to think about how to constantly disturb the archive. and constantly disturb the perceptions of race by taking it seriously, but not being traumatized by it, by not succumbing to its desires. For example, there were moments where it was very trendy to be in London, Black or Asian, and the, you know, state were doing all these kinds of events for Asians and this and that.
and it was all very like this kind of scene, very scene. And it was fun for a time, but I never completely trusted it because I thought they could just take it away and we would be like hung out to dry again, which is, you know, what's been happening, you know, through the course of pop, you know, authoritarianism as it's been developed in the UK. Things have changed and gone backwards. There has been, as Mark Fisher says, a slow cancellation of the future. I think Kojo and I felt that, you know, we have a duty to think about these politics. And in terms of the captures of race, we have a duty to just fuck with that in every way we can, you know, as kids of the families that we're from and the interests that we have.
So it became, I think, for our generation a tool, okay, of course you're going to intervene in some way in writing or in music writing like Kojo did or in music making like I did or in television. So there was this sense that you could think about all these questions creatively in the UK at that time. And there was a sense that you could intervene. So books and people that we've been fascinated by and writers, I mean, Octavia Butler, of course, is one, you know, Sadia Hartman is another, Fred Moten is another.
You can see, I mean, in the credits for Quiet Sun, there's a lot of names there. Every name that is there is because they informed the making of that work. So the credits are a kind of reading list or kind of curriculum. The idea is that, you know, if you see a name that you don't know, you should, the idea is that you should come and like send us an email or come up, talk to us and say, okay, you know that, who's that person you mentioned at the end of Quiet Son? And then we'll happily tell you. The trick is you have to approach us. You have to come to us.
So in a way, the credit sequence is deliberately quite long because they are like the footnotes or they're like a sequel. They give you an insight into the nine-tenths that didn't make it into the work. but they also tell you the kind of coordinates within which the work sits. They show you the cognitive map within which the work is navigating its existence and the argumentation the work is making.
It's really the, it's a kind of methodological device to pull people in, to pull in people who are fascinated by and concerned with these questions. For the people who aren't, fine. But for those who are, this is a kind of shout out to them. it's like we hear you because we're reading this we're reading these books too um and we know you are out there so you know it's for those who it's for those who know and for those who care for those who want to know and those who would like to know that's yeah and it's and it's also
kind of a way of um you realize that you know the radical black tradition or um has always been kept alive by conversations that have you know stretched back to the beginning of various different struggles against imperialism or against racial struggles you know within these contexts like the UK race struggles so you realize that these conversations are also things that have to be you have to name people you have to name traditions you have to name practices as being part of your world and by creating the connections between these networks or lines of affinity. I would say also to add to what Kojo was saying that the, something we've said a lot,
but there's no reason not to say it again. The very fact of being or calling ourselves a collective or thinking along the lines of what it means to have collective practices imbricated within the very practice of making films, making videos. One has to collaborate, one is forced, not forced, but one is learning from different people's skills all the time. And that goes for somebody who might sit at our table, you know, and eat dinner and say something. The way they have said it has already produced 10 images or 10 conjunctions that require images or require sounds. So that person,
and there've been thousands who've sat there and I've cooked for like the whole world, you know, have, we named those people too. So there is a sense of, you know, yeah, what Kojo is saying, they are, we, we, the end of each film, all the films, there's one that's 15 minutes long. Otterly 3 is 15 minutes long, I think. And the, and we really make a drama out of these sequences. It's like the end of an album. It's the end of a song. It's like the, you know, album notes, or it's like, yeah, just the most amazing sequences in cinema or you know title sequences credit sequences we love those so we really enjoy working with the aesthetics of that as well but also i think
there was this sense in the art world um with that moment of the young british artists where the individual was being kind of celebrated as this sort of mobile figure with this celebrity character like Tracey Emin or Damien Hirst and then other people making video work you know people like Steve McQueen or people like you know whose work I really like but at the time but you know you'd see their work and that would just be like Steve McQueen at the end of it and I think for us we wanted to just be more honest about the relationships you have as an artist with your friends and with the people that you work with and with the collaborations with the dead as well you know in that these that that you know they are there they exist and you cannot call
yourself an artist who who you cannot be celebrated as a black artist if if the art world celebrates you in the UK at all but you cannot unless you I think and you cannot talk about race I think unless you have exposed that part of your practice. You, you know, exposed it as a way of sharing. It's against the very construct of the neoliberal singular artist, you know. And, you know, when Fred Moten says, I consent not to be, we have consent not to, to consent not to be a single being. I mean, this is deeply spiritual, you know, as well, in the sense that, you know, deep in, there's many beautiful things about Tantric philosophy,
but one of them is, you know, just this sense that we are made of this divine energy, that your body and your mind, your knowledge should combine, can combine with, to feel it, you know, to act on it, it's an ethical question, you know. So I think the idea that we are multiple, and that we are many-headed, you know, it is, you know, it is a way, it is also a way of thinking to support that. That's really thrilling, the idea not only of direct collaboration, but as that being, you know, intergenerational and transnational and across an intellectual tradition, I think.
You've talked a lot about the future and you also you you talk about sonic quality a lot and to take that to its most literal level sound the the soundtrack and the sound design in this film are incredibly futuristic in a way even though you're talking about the past. and you know the year of the quiet sun evokes this astronomical cosmic perspective where it feels like you're mapping the political historical of it onto the astronomical that plays into time and linearity so how I guess how did you arrive aesthetically at that speculative place and to bring it back to the sound design of the film how did you incorporated that way.
We spent a lot of time talking with our sound designer, Tyler Friedman. We spent a lot of time saying, look, this is, this work is about this prospective United States of Africa. So we want you to compose music for that prospect. like you have to imagine a futuristic pan-Africanist musique concret so the musique concret that you know is always linked to specific spaces and specific cities okay but now you you have to understand modernity is happening right here in Accra in 1958 so from that point just speculate forward from there
And then it's, you know, it's the trial and error in which Tyler tries to evoke that sense of this kind of sonic future. So that's partly what's going on there. And then you're right, it is a project of political astronomy in which the grand project of continental liberation and continental liberation is then linked to this project of solar exploration, which then becomes the point from which to observe the political tensions and political dramas on the ground of the continent.
the different Pan-Africanist factions, the Casablanca group, the Casablanca group were the most radical Pan-Africanists, that's Ghana, Guinea, Morocco, the Monrovia group, Liberia, Sudan, much less, much less radical. the Brazzaville group, French-speaking, Francophone African countries, frankly reactionary, Cote d'Ivoire, many other countries like this. So the Pan-Africanist project splits into three factions, and then there are tensions within these
factions, tensions everywhere. Nkrumah called it fissions, fissions in the popular front, like a nuclear fission process that's just gone wrong. Everything has become fissiparous. Everything is fissile and motile and splitting up. And then yes, this, this bizarre project, you know, which I've never heard of before the idea that every 11 years there is this phenomenon of the quiet sun i mean i just never heard of it i'd heard of a progressive rock group called quiet sun but i had no idea that quiet sun meant literally a quiet sun although that's such a poetic way i
mean the temperature of the sun drops whichever scientist decided to call that temperature decrease a quiet sun that's a kind of an amazing idea because of course it's nothing to do with volume at all but it suits our purposes i think as soon as i read it i was like yeah that's the title so this idea of the quiet sun and this idea of these so-called solar observatories taking this voyage to study the surface of the sun and then this idea that the universal postal union would ask almost literally every country on the planet to issue stamps. I mean it's just quite a bizarre coordinated project which has slipped out of history entirely but nonetheless because it
coincided with the year 65 to 66 it became historically available for our purposes because that's the point at which you start getting an increasing number of military coup detas at the beginning of 1966 the president of nigeria um abu abu bakar talifa balawa he's assassinated um in 66 in krumah's convention people's party is overthrown and then from there just accelerates. So the 65 to 66 is, they are the years of lead, the years in which the counter
revolution really picks up speed. So this convergence, this conjunction of the astronomical scale of exploration and this continental drama that is meeting these forces of imperial neocolonial counter-reaction you have these are such they're like two epic forces on the ground and in the sky and the idea that these stamps of you know what three centimeters by three centimeters. The idea that these stamps can try to condense and conduct and
conduct these epic political dramas in this small area of space, it becomes very attractive so that the feeling is very much the philosopher Gaston Bachelard who talks a lot about the evocation of an intimate immensity a structure of feeling that is simultaneously immense and simultaneously intimate and the stamps give you this quality and the whole, in a way, the whole video tries to put you into that state of this confrontation
with the immense at the scale of the intimate. But I think this was achieved with Tyler because when we work with Tyler, he, yeah, just to talk about how that was thought about a little bit Kojo like Sonic cleaning. He's somebody we've worked with for quite a few years now on quite a few films and he basically, we give him long reading lists and we give him tons of things to listen to, some of it he's already aware of and he just kind of goes right into it and he works with hundreds of In fact, he used to live in this house and he had this room like full of synths.
And I was like, who's this rich kid? You know, with all these synths. But then I was like, well, he can work with us. He's American from San Diego, but he was studying at Goldsmiths. That's why he was in London. Yeah. And so we did the film Hydra's the Capita with him, the one on Drexia and Underground Resistance. And I'm singing on that. But he really does, I would say, understand what we are into, where Mayat and Kojo is. He gets it wrong sometimes, we have big arguments, but basically he kind of gets where our heads are at musically. And he really does understand many music traditions. And so he's a bit of a genius in that way.
And he's like a little brother. He's very sweet as well. So he just completely absorbs himself. and with this I think because also there's something else to talk about which is the sound of the voice because it's not it is also a sound you know it's also producing a rhythm and a texture and a beat and a flow people are brought into the film through this people are brought in like steadied in a way like let's take you through this and that involves um a certain way of a certain sort of way of uh speaking I think which I can talk about in a minute but the I think with the other sounds in the film yeah I mean Tyler really understood this sense of a kind of
solar quietude uh but also like a kind of solar sonic bursts you know which are like really there inside these deep bass kind of electronic tones and then with this kind of electrical kind of beautiful sheer sound over the top of these deep deep sort of bass like tones and then the other aspect was you know in the magnification of the stamp and the kind of and the actual stamp size itself there is um all these sonic possibilities because the when you open up the stamp you see its kind of grain you know you see its weave you see its texture and this was why we wanted this kind of um concrete sound so you have the images of the
dams and you have the images of like various forms of industry airplane sounds and basically Tyler observed the stamps magnified and thought about like this emptiness this there's a kind of There's a real emptiness, there's a real melancholy. I don't know if it's the feeling that that film produces for me is very strange. It has these, there's sounds which give you this kind of empty kind of like, as if you're sort of in a large room, an echo, I hate the word echo chamber, but like a space with a lot of reverb and echo. And he really, you know, there's we chose all these sounds with him and kind of wanted to stay within this structure of
feeling so you hear the grain of the of industry you hear the echo of industry you hear it's kind of you hear it within a proximity and in a distance and a kind of closeness so this was all going on And then I think the voice, it was quite a hard voice to do because I used to be a singer. And when you sing, you don't want to sing out, especially if you're interested in lyrics and speaking and putting your mouth around lyrics. You are really holding the voice in yourself. But it's not yourself, exactly. It's also the listener. So you are keeping the listener engaged
while also holding the voice in yourself and speaking it with a quietude. You speak it with a steadiness. It's very difficult to do, you know, and how one, because it has, you have to kind of be absent. You are not, that's the challenge, the challenge is how to kind of be absent, but yet keep people inside this space. So much of what you're both talking about with the astronomical scale and the futurity and collaborations just feel like they connect so deeply to what you were talking about before,
Anjali, about the sort of relationship between the collectivity of your practice and art making, with the sort of necessary collectivity of like politics and our liberation struggles. And there's one audience question that I thought maybe I'd read aloud and we could maybe end there. I think it will tie things together nicely. Someone asked, using the credits as a method of inviting engagement with your audience makes me wonder about your thinking about audience. specifically pertaining to being a collective and addressing archive. What have your experiences or thought processes been around working with or for an audience?
Well, I mean, I think the question of the audience, you know, it's a question of the potential. It's a question of who that audience might be. We don't have any very fixed vision of who the work is addressed to. In a way, these kinds of projects, they're quite self-selecting. We make them for people who are, who in a way respond to the call made by work. The work invites, or I hope it invites viewings and reviewings, you know.
And in a way, it's the people who rise to that challenge, which is also an invitation. People who can see the generosity that is entailed in making work that is kind of research-based, where the work is designed to be absorbed and reabsorbed. You know, the question of audience is, it's kind of an open one, because in a way, the question of screening. Yeah, in a way, I'm more comfortable putting the question of audience into the questions of screenings.
because in a way, whatever it is I know about moving image comes from screenings, you know, from being a teenager going to two different repertory cinemas in London, the Everyman cinema, which is in Hampstead in North London, that's showing a lot of a lot of Godard and Truffaut, the French Nouvelle Vague, but also Bresson. And then the Scala cinema in King's Cross, which is more in the center of town, that's showing more kind of queer cinema, showing like John Waters, Pasolini and Fassbinder.
And, you know, just going, and this is the end of the 80s, the 80s beginning of the 90s it's very cheap you know for two or three pounds you can watch like three amazing films you can spend five hours watching amazing films and I spent a lot of my teenage years doing just that just going back and forth between the scholar and the every man you know and uh I and it was always by myself and I was always very happy I wouldn't talk to anybody. I was just sitting there watching films. I was happy whether I fully understood the films or not. In a way, I couldn't lose. The films were always good, and when they weren't good,
that was just more to think about. So in a way, the question of audience is linked to this question of the screening as a psychic space of encounter in which you seek out things which in a way are beyond your vocabulary. Like if you're a teenager, you don't necessarily understand films about divorce or depression because you're 17. So, you know, I'm watching Last Tanger in Paris. I couldn't fully grasp Marlon Brando's depression. Not really. So
I'm watching it closely, but I didn't... You didn't realise that he was a macho pervert, you mean? No, not really. I'm not sure I had the vocabulary for it. Not really. I certainly didn't have the life experience for it. And I'm not sure I had the emotional or verbal vocabulary to understand that. But there I was watching it. So to me, the cinema is bound up with experiences that are at the limit of semantic availability, as Raymond Williams says, that they are at the limit of your semantic capacity to verbalize what it is you've experienced.
So that limit is an emotional, linguistic and psychic limit. And in a way, that limit, which is quite a disruptive one, you know, in a way, that's kind of what I want from cinema. that's kind of what I want from moving image the confrontation with the moving image is a confrontation with your limits to fully grasp what that image and what those sounds and what those noises and those voices and those words are doing with you and to you because you know you might be if you're lucky you could be processing that encounter for years
you know, it's become part of your psychic infrastructure. So in a way, in a way that's kind of, that's how I see the question of audience. It's not a question. It's not a question of, of, of who an audience is or what an audience is or where they are. It's a question of a certain psychic structure of, of a certain psychic, a certain confrontation with a psychic limit. And so what this requires is that the work is, the work is a bit beyond you. The work is not something you can grasp.
The work exceeds and eludes your capacity to contain or comprehend it. and um and the the audience is those people who who search for that confrontation with that psychic limit that's that's that's what i was that's what has formed me and the bet is that there were many people like that. They're everywhere. And wherever they are, this cinema is for them. That's really, that's a really beautiful way of putting it. And I, I would second that,
except my church was, was, were nightclubs, you know, as well. So, you know, as well as being the Scarlet and the Everyman cinema, it was also the Ritzy in Brixton. And, um, the dub reggae gigs in Brixton, the Jaa Shaka gigs. And I think, yeah, it was basically like London as a kind of unfolding of all kinds of different activities and things going on in music culture and in, of course, in cinema. And I think the one of the things that was really, I talk about this a lot, but why not, was television. You know, television was like, really, there was such incredible work on, you know, Stuart Hall coming back from clubbing.
You know, you'd sit there and watch Stuart Hall, basically, you know, the great Caribbean thinker, sociologist Stuart Hall, basically unpacking the British media, you know, racially, you know, deconstructing the British media as this young, handsome, you know, super articulate Oxford graduate. And he was, you know, that was like, yeah, we come from a kind of long tradition in the UK of all these different generations of like, people who have, you know, there's been black writing in Britain for 200 years for example um but television was a way that you felt like okay there's like really crazy stuff on television like really properly crazy psychedelic weird stuff on television all the
time Bunuel's on television at seven you know my first memory of television of cinema is um battleship Potemkin you know where on the steps of where is it in Russia Odessa steps yeah and the shot of the baby in the pram going down the steps the other wound was you know Rosemary's baby and many other films Pasolini's that one of Pasolini's films, Theorema as well. And I saw all these as a child, you know. And I think that basically what I became aware of here was that that was a kind of anti...
It was like this moment where anti-imperialism or kind of unpacking the history of race and all of these things and all these music cultures that were going, all these bands, all these sounds, all these brilliant artists everywhere. you just realize, okay, this, I am growing up in a kind of leftist populism, you know, at the moment, you know, this is what I felt that we grew up inside. And everybody was watching it, you know, you'd go to a club and say, Oh, did you see that film on TV last night? Or you'd go to school and say, Did you see that? Have some fight, you know, or you'd, you know, or you'd have a really good conversation, you know, it was basically like this centralized sort of space where there was all this stuff going on and you could go to it and it was there and it created
an assembly around it, it created communities around you know new movies created communities, new albums created communities around them. They created nights at clubs, they created concerts, they created gatherings and I think that having grown up in that I felt it was our task, not task, but it was like the challenge, how do you create a sort of cinema, a post-cinematic leftist populism if you like now, you know, what is that populism? Yeah, you know, people think that if you're black or Asian or whatever, you're supposed to make some kind of feel good, you know, work that kind of, you know, where, you know, I don't know, like most of, you know, populist,
you know, black cinema that's fashionable right now, there is this sense of, or at least, you know, you grow up with these success stories, oh, this person's made it, that's, that person's made it with this sort of work or film that's, you know, everyone is watching in commercial cinema, or even in the commercial art world. But I think for us, there was a sense of like, again, sort of, yeah, because complexity was attractive to us. We didn't want to tell a simple story after having grown up like that, you know, you want to tell the story that's as complicated as the visual culture that you've been brought up in, if not more complicated, and not complicated to the point where it's kind of hermetic
and it's shutting people out. But it's like saying, no, we respect you enough to know that you're also experiencing this shit, that you're also experiencing this psychedelic, crazy sort of world that we're growing up in together, where cinema is taking on a different form. Yeah, it's not complexity for its own sake. The question of complexity is tied to the question of Afro-diasporic becoming. It's tied to the confrontation with the conventional archetypes and stereotypes that are circulating around you.
And the desire is to build what Edward Said called an interpretive community. The idea is that images and sounds are very good for building interpretive communities and a certain kind of complexity that, you know, something very compelling happens when you put black artists together together with complex work, like the complication of Black art, the complication that is engendered by Black artists, like the complication of Black art and Black complexity and the complicatedness that black artists make for art. Those things are and require the building of interpretive
communities around them. Something very special happens when you embark on that kind of work. it makes trouble, it has a political valence, you know, because there's certain kinds of work that is all too normative. And as soon as you move towards work that has what A.J., what Arthur Jaffer calls an abnormativity. As soon as you move towards the abnormative, not the abnormal, the abnormative, as soon as you move towards that, then you set up all kinds of
of cognitive glitches and epistemic panics. And that's a good thing, you know. And in a way, you can train yourself to enjoy and to thrive on that. And in a way, building an interpretive community around the challenge of work that brings together the question of what it is that is happening when artists of color make work that complicates what it means to be an artist, what color means,
what aren't means it's I think there's I think that's a very satisfying and demanding and unfinished project to undertake that there are lots of ways of doing that you know so yeah so I guess the question is to reframe the question of audience in terms of the psyche on one hand in terms of interpretive community on the other, and in terms of this special kind of trouble that artists of color make when they take on the task and the pleasure and the excitement of experimentation.
Thank you. That's so well said and thrilling, actually. I love the idea of watching Stuart Hall after hitting the club. And I know we feel really lucky to have discovered your work. You know, it felt like there was definitely something psychic happening. Like, oh my, like this is, was waiting to be found. Like it was supposed to happen. And is exactly, you know, at the, it's exactly the time we needed to discover it. And as we continue to grapple with it and it continues to challenge us, I'm so grateful that we've had the opportunity to discuss it with you. And, you know, thank you to everyone for tuning in and watching. You can see the film tonight at 7pm. Just go to mazels.org and you can purchase a ticket there.
The rest of the Instant Ancestry program will be available until November 26th. Thank you to Christopher and Curtis and thank you Kojo and Anjali so much. Well, thanks very much. Thanks, Ine. Thanks, Emily. Thanks, Curtis. Thanks, Chris. Thanks to all of you. I just saw that there's someone in the chat. He says, in Hungarian language, we use the term quiet flame, meaning smaller flame in cooking or setting the fireplace. I guess this is present in other languages as well. It's from Gergo Kis. I think that was the guy who filmed for us the ice in Budapest. That's right. Yeah, I think so. Yes, he says. All right. So hi, Gergo. Good to hear from you. That's one of the wonders of this moment.
Yeah, it's great. Well, thanks for tuning in. And yeah, really, thanks to everybody for making this possible. And enjoy the film tonight. The post-cinematic work and the video work has different ways of describing it and um if you like quiet sun um there's other works as well which i think might might fascinate you but i think quiet sun is a pretty good portal into the work so um i guess uh we'll say goodbye at this point thank you um if you want to do this thank you very much it's really been a pleasure and if you want to do it again if you have i think yeah just get in touch. Wonderful. Yeah, there's a work called Nucleus of the Great Union, which I think you
might find intriguing. In fact, if you want to do a collaboration with the Department of Xenogenesis, we could, we could, you know, do a collaboration with you and go into more depth and maybe invite somebody else to come in, somebody we've worked with or something like that. We would love to, and I actually forgot to say at the beginning, can you talk a little bit about the Department of xenogenesis? Yes. It's basically, you know, so much work and time has gone into, you know, in the last 18 years into making this practice possible. But of course, and some of that is expressed in the films and some of that six, those ideas expressed in films, and some of the ideas are expressed in containers like writing or, you know, other art projects that we do, but there is
so much that there isn't, that doesn't go into the works that express themselves in the world. A lot of teaching goes on, but those are within institutions where obviously value is extracted out of institutions or educational institutions in different ways. And I just, we just began to realize that there was a lot that we are already doing but we we should put it within the frame of our own practice um and basically you know i think the financialization of education and the uh violence of um education right now in terms of it's um it's it's it's turned into a kind
of business you know um and students are clients are more and more like you know are actually you clients in some ways, the actual process of learning has become very fractured and very corrupted. And I think the idea of, you know, artists doing education platforms is one that, you know, happened a while ago in the art world, like different, you know, artists doing that. But for me, one of the things that lacked was a curriculum. I was always like, why isn't there an actual curriculum? What are you scared of? And I think it was like almost mirroring this kind of neoliberal tendency towards like, let's just not get to create too many antagonisms.
It's like the world is screaming antagonism, but it's like, let's not produce antagonisms. Let's just try and make everything, you know, like some Benettonized sort of, you know, education, feel good thing. And it began to get so annoying. Even though I learned a lot from it, I started to feel like I'm in a world which is speaking to itself all the time in some ways. and I just thought, I started to think, well, actually, we could create something which is bringing together all of these different, like with the exhibition, bringing together all of these different works that produce another space in themselves, which is, I would say, the last sort of 18 years of practice. And it is an experiment at thinking around the scalar,
um the interscalar interscalar time different kind of temporalities looking at everything from like i said before the center of the earth to the cosmos and all the material stories and realities of post-human life and human life and non-human life um that that um co-exists and thinking about what that education what an education like that might be in relation to dealing with the world that presents itself as such so it helps if you're a fan of Octavia Estelle butler so I was just going to get Octavia Estelle butler you can see in my background that's from the that's from the
Xenogenesis show that was at the ICA in Richmond at VCU. It's from the, it's from a Say Her Name march, which was in June, July of this year. So the young man with the rifle is a guard who's been invited by the Say Her Name march to guard their passage. So they are out of frame and he's talking to somebody with a mobile phone so you can't see the women who were just approaching but you can see Octavia Butler that was a poster every time the Xenogenesis exhibition travels a new banner is made so Octavia Butler is staring at you the young man is staring another way
and the women are approaching and within this triangle of looks within this triangle of gazes that's one way of situating dxg because you know it helps to read some octavia butler at this moment in time whether whether you start with parable of the sower or parable talents or kindred or wild seed or the xenogenesis trilogy itself it doesn't matter so long as you read okay with us and if you are then that's a good portal to dxg that's so cool we definitely would love to collaborate with you all right then well
we'll be in touch then in the meantime have a great day you too and yeah thanks thanks for putting this on and making this happen and uh yep we'll talk thank you bye thank you Thank you Natalie, thank you Curtis. Bye then.