So welcome, good evening. We are very happy to welcome so many people to today's Artist Talk. Sylvia Liska from the Friends of the Session is not here, that's why I have the great honor to introduce our speakers today. This is Artist Talk takes place on the occasion of the exhibition What the Owl Knows by the Ottolid Group. We welcome Angelica Saga and Kojo Eshun from the Ottolid Group and Richard Cousins, the conversation partner. The Ottolid Group was founded in 2002 by Angelica and Kojo. For 20 years now, they produce groundbreaking work in many different media.
They address fundamental questions in relation to global politics, the long shadow of past events, the history and defects of colonialism, neocolonialism, often using science fiction as a tool, as a science fiction of the present, as they call it. I really shortened now the list of topics dramatically. Today at the session, the new moving image work, What the Owl Knows Premiers, something that really fills us with pride. Thank you very much, Kocho and Angelica, for really doing this massive effort and producing this new beautiful work for us. We're really very honored. For this work, they collaborated with their friend, painter and writer Linette Yadom-Boachi. It also shows their attention the Ottolid group pays to both the visual and the sonic qualities in their work.
That's where today's conversation partner comes into play. Richard Cousins is a longtime friend and collaborator of the Ottolid group. He was already involved in their very first film with the title The Otter List from 2003. He is a researcher, writer and practicing artist, making and exhibiting work both as a solo artist and collaboratively. His research interests include moving image, the human voice in artistic practice, song, photography in contemporary art and the relationship between the avant-garde early cinema and music hall. His recent book, Voice as Art, From Theater to Forensics, is published by Rutledge this year. Fine, at the end, I would like to thank the Friends of Succession
and especially Sylvia Liska that they make this format possible, that we have these artist conversations. And I would like to inform you, but I think you all know it, that afterwards we opened the exhibitions by Jean-Frederick Schnieder and Patricia Boyd and, of course, the Ottolid Group. So now I pass the word on to you. Thank you very much. Who's going to start? I'd just like to say thank you for inviting me here today. As you just said, I first worked with Kojo and Anjali on Otolith 1, for the first work, and I shared the space of a microgravity flight
near Russia on that occasion. But since then, the Autolist Group have made a huge body of work, and so it's a great pleasure to have this conversation now. Thank you for joining us, Richard. Not at all, no. But looking at the film, I think that it's constructed from overlapping yet opposing structures, like day and night, inside and outside. There's allegorical sequences using digital assets and indexical sound and image, sort of in contrast to that. And then the actual sound, the privileging of what might be noise, or thought to be noise, is also up against kind of highly theatrical speech.
and so I think the allegory of the owl in Lynette's practice in her painting and poetry questions the formation of knowledge so that's, you know it's tempting almost for me to say what does the owl see with its big eyes but it's not, it's what the owl knows and what does the artist know, what do we know and so I'm opening with this Yeah, thank you for that, Richard. I mean, it's strange because we can hear Lynette's voice. There's Lynette speaking right now. So she's a presence, a vocal presence with us. So, yeah, thank you for those thoughts.
We have a tendency to take a moment from our work as a title which acts to initiate you into what we call the climate of fiction of the work, so that even when you don't know it, you are already approaching the world that we're trying to assemble. So what the owl knows comes from a moment in one of Lynette's poems. In fact, the very poem we can hear right now. And she says a line something like,
the strength and endurance to know what the owl knows. And I think it's a question of poetics. You know, in a way, in this work, part of what interests us is to displace the biographical drive, the drive to know the life of the artist, to displace the kind of psychological drive to know the intention of the artist, like what is it that motivates Lynette? So we want to displace those two questions and in their place
what we want to do is dramatise Lynette's poetry so poetry stands where those other forms usually dominate and so the question of what the owl knows is a recursive question the question is how do we know what the owl knows about what the owl knows so it's not so much that we're going to answer that question but the question itself will be a kind of entrance into what Zadie Smith called the narrative mysteries that are entailed in Lynette's work. So, you know, I don't know how many people have seen the show so far, but when you enter, there are all these, we call them travelling elements,
which have moved from the body of the video and they greet you. they're like kind of they're like invitations and initiations they're welcoming you and they are slightly distanced and slightly forbidding all at once and you will encounter them later on and so the owl is a figure that you will encounter many times and in a way the title is just saying is just welcoming you to a kind of owl's knowledge. I mean, we're fascinated by owls, you know, and Lynette shares that fascination. And so a lot of the work is about
trying to find cross-media parallels between how Lynette approaches what she does and how we approach the kind of work we do. I mean it was in the kind of spirit of another work that we made on Etel Ednan this kind of and I suppose the work we did on Black Audio Film Collective or on Haroon Farocki you know our work curatorially and with other artists we've worked with being they alive or dead there is this has always been this sense of wanting to kind of put a field of protection around
them instead of you know thinking of them as an object in relation to their value and that is on kind of many different levels you know so with Lynette you know her work is about kind of an intervention into to, you know, scenes, like forces of mass, of light, of colour, of, you know, where these characters emerge from the painting's surface. Black men and women and children, black life, you know,
in a kind of, in a sort of indifferent scenes. One thinks, I mean, Lynette's kind of more interested in Walter Sickert than she is with any other kind of contemporary painter. And, you know, when we think about the concept of race and as it gains its force during the 19th century, this is where Lynette kind of intervenes, into the turn of the century as well, into these worlds in Europe where clearly all the money that was all the kind of capital that was being gained through slavery also produced an absence of black life obviously so she intervenes in this state of absence with this interiority and I guess we wanted to protect this interiority
in a way that thinks about how we look at her, looking at her work. So I guess there is this double optic going on and also in relation to the sound. Yes. I can't find the quote here. I've got it written down. Yes, you've said that the idea of paying attention and the film, the way it's shot, where we don't see the whole painting, we see close-ups of the painting. And this kind of construction withdraws some kind of the preordained idea
of what Lynette should be doing as a painter. And that's, you know, there's a quote from Denise Ferreira da Silva that she used this phrase, anti-colonial aesthetic interaction and and that's what um you know Lynette's doing in some ways speak about that or is that yeah I think um you know that some of the most compelling moments in the work and I apologize for all the people who haven't had a chance to see it yet it's kind of amazing to see so many people ranged in front of us but if you have a chance to see it there these moments when Lynette's back, Lynette often steps back to look at her work and her back fills
the camera frame, you know, and these moments of visual frustration, these moments where we, where Lynette blocks the camera's capacity to reveal and to reframe, these moments of thwarting and frustrating, these moments are very satisfying. These moments where our desire to gaze and watch and know and understand, when they're blocked and our gaze is returned to us. And these are, I would say, these are part of what's going on. This would be one way of thinking
through Denise Ferreira de Silva's account of what we can call an anti-colonial aesthetic intervention. Broadly, I'd say the black figure, black figuration, black figuration in the frame of Western painting is over-determined, over-determined by multiple forces, over-determined by capitalism and slavery. And so what part of Lynette's project and part of why she's inspiring for us is that she has created a number of methods and processes for under-determining the black figure in the frame of Western modernity
as a cultural figure of painting. So that when you look at Lynette's painting, it's not clear where the characters are. It's not clear who they are. It's not clear when they are. nothing about them is overdetermined by by predicates by qualities, by attributes that can explain and situate them so what Lynette I think, part of what we think Lynette is working on is that she's worked out a way of suspending those forms of overdetermination which attempt to fix the black figure in the frame of the Western canvas.
And this suspension is about generating contingency and conditionality and the unthought and the unknown. That's what Lynette's doing. And to do that inside of painting dedicated to and emerging from that tradition from Delacroix and Velazquez, that's quite an achievement. For us, we find that inspiring because it helps us to think about what happens when we bring a camera to bear on that project of underdetermination. So, you know, Lynette is not making portraits. As we all know, she's not painting from life. She has no models. She has no people who sit for her.
She's compositing. And so this underdetermination is an act of sheer mental determination and intervention. And so a lot of the project is to say, you know, what happens when we do what Brent Hayes-Edgwood calls, hear across media? What happens when we hear across painting? What happens when we approach video making through the lens of Lynette's painting? What happens when we approach video as if we can begin to undo the frame in the same way as Lynette is undoing the painting frame?
That's the aspiration. You know, whether we succeed or not is not as important as the effort, you know, because that's in a way, that's the political urgency for us of her work. And it inspires us to draw out a kind of poetic salience, you know, how to make videos salient when it confronts painting. Yes, it's interesting. I think the sound as the piece moves on is very intense. At the beginning, it's quite a dry brush, so you get this incredible kind of noise,
which, of course, Lynette can't hear because she's wearing the earbuds. And then at the same time, we hear what's going on outside, which is like a kind of overhearing of these mixtures of sounds. I was going to say something there but I've gone off on a tangent sorry it will come back to me but yeah what I was going to say was as the film goes on it then it becomes more contemplative in the second section when she's stepping back more to look at the work But then in the titles, the urgency returns, strangely,
so they aren't like a kind of margin or diminuendo at the end. They become suddenly activated like those brush marks at the beginning, I thought. Yeah, I mean, I just wanted to go back quickly to the kind of earlier question in relation to Lynette's work to kind of abstract the kind of forms of desire and, you know, representations. I think we share very much with her something that we've been doing and something I've been, you know, something that kind of feels quite natural in a way to people like Kojo and I, born in the time that we were born in, in a city like London. And I kind of, you know,
think of the aesthetics of disidentification with the kind of various categories, you know, various extractive categories, be they being woman, be they being class, be they being black, be they being brown, be they, you know, whatever it might be. I think in the hub of the city, because everyone is sort of, when people could live in London cheaply, we could all have very good, we could have fights, arguments, we could dance, we could, you know, we could go to clubs, we could live, you know. And I think inside that kind of friction, there was no kind of search. Inside those convivial antagonisms, there was no search for any identity
to kind of overwhelm any other identity. You know, it was like these were not, this wasn't the kind of, these weren't the culture wars, you know, of identity politics. At that time, there was a desire to coalitions, be they sonic coalitions or visual coalitions or collectives, bands, you know, different movements. And when I think about the history of the left in a city that comes out of, you know, a long history in Britain, it's all from collectives of groups of multi-ethnic people, forms of rebellion against different forces at different times. and I think you know one doesn't know in you know I kind of want to talk about it because I think it
sort of you know it does have a power to kind of put some words around what those aesthetics might be you know because they're not resilient they're actually a kind of resistant revolutionary kind of force that one wants to be part of. You know, I think in terms of the sound, I mean, there is a lot to say about the sound because the brushstrokes are being made by another great revolutionary figure called Pat Thomas, who's a new music composer. He's in his 70s, originally from Trinidad, lives in Oxford, and he works with piano and prepared pianos. And, for example, we wanted to think sonically
if we were going to use music with musicians not from America, not African-American music scene, but British music. So Pat Thomas's Brushstrokes, you know, works with the kind of ASMR aspects of the work where we miked the back of the canvas and the mixing desk as she paints. We wanted to heighten the relation to the microphone as a brush, the microphone and the brush. And then the brush of the drum strokes becomes another form of kind of touching and breathing life into these different forces.
the brush strokes that we hear when Lynette's on the walk and she stops in the woods it's as if it's funny as if they're like at the first they seem very direct and you can see the brush but then those brush strokes are like a memory or which brush strokes are those do you think because it moves on of course and then you have other sounds over she's painting at the end towards the end it all. Things get switched up a lot in it, I think, in terms of sound and image. Switched? Switched up, moved around. Their relationship is played with a lot. Sounds on the move. Sounds move. And sounds imply or invite
what we call this hearing across media, which in our case is a kind of sonic practice of image making. like approaching images sonically and trying to um trying to think with the noise of an image and trying to think through um what people call the acoustic an acoustic an acoustic epistemology a kind of amplified acoustic epistemology an amplified way of knowing what an image is or could be or might be when sounds start to travel
when you move them around that capacity to activate a kind of sonic way of knowing you're kind of amplifying that you're heightening it and you're kind of, you're saying to people, don't read the sounds indexically. You know, hear, you know, listen to an indexical sound as it shapeshifts and takes on another form. It moves towards the metaphorical, it moves towards the apostrophic. It just takes on, in a way, a certain kind of lyric noise, you know, a certain kind of lyricism through the irritation of noise.
So those are some of the things we want to activate, you know, and hopefully, in a way, you might sense these things, you know, the kind of devices of sensitisation. you're like hmm yeah something's something's moved you know can i follow it you know it's you know can i go where can i go where it goes and where is that and but it's okay to go with that because it's you're invited to go with it you know yes well i certainly think that happens in the work for sure. And I remember this quote from John Berger,
that a still soundless painting becomes a corridor connecting the moment it represents with the moment at which it is being viewed. That's beautiful. Can you say that again? Slower and louder. Yes, sorry. I think everybody would appreciate that because it's a beautiful quote. Okay, it is a still soundless painting becomes a corridor connecting the moment it represents with the moment at which it is viewed, or I've paraphrased that. But I think that is interesting in terms of your work generally and this work in particular, because I think your work works with histories, revisions of histories, and connecting the present moment to the past in many ways. But specifically in this work,
we've got the present moment of the painting in the ways we're saying with a reconfigured listening and all these sounds that are going on including what's going on outside the window and these mixtures of sounds, what you've just said. I think it's a beautiful formulation because Burge's notion of a still soundless painting as a corridor, as a passage you know to me suggests a certain kind of um trans sensorial capacity a certain capacity to build a corridor from one sense to another to to to link this to link that which is still
which implies it's antonym that which is moving to link that with soundlessness which clearly heightens the sound of silencedness, the sound of soundlessness. So a corridor is a beautiful image of articulation. Actually, it's what Birgit does really well. It's a figure of thought, a denk built, an image thought. Like the owl, the owl is a denk built. the owl is an image of thought which is which haunts us from our days working on
with Chris Marker on the owl's legacy I think many people are confounded and amused by owls and I think throughout the video we attempt to populate the video with this sound world of owls crows, ravens, field mice, larks, mostly generated through the vocal practice of an artist called Laurie Lixenberg, whose practice is extended vocal technique. So she populates the video with shrieks and...
Yeah, yells. I mean, quite blood-curdling in a way. And that's all really important because you get this, it's this, you know, it's this acuzmatic world which is giving it some kind of febrile quality, some kind of unseen world that is present. And I think it's Lynette, when Lynette writes, she often taps into that world, a world in which crows and pigeons observe humans behaving badly and comment on them from a distance. A world in which birds take on this kind of allegorical sense, like because birds are beyond good and evil, they can look back at us and they can watch us without judging.
and they can watch humans as they inevitably engineer their own demise. That tends to happen in Lynette's work. Yes. I mean, the pigeon is also, you know, somewhat of a curmudgeonly jealous, gaslighting Tory, you know, who is like telling this... We started by modelling the pigeon in the beginning on Ted Heath. Yes, so we showed Laurie Lichtenberg various British politicians. Edward Heath, can you go from Ted Heath to Christopher Hitchens? That was our initial guide and she got that straight away. So if you haven't seen it yet, in the middle of the video
there's a scene based on a Lynette story. It's a kind of argument, a kind of one-sided argument between a pigeon and an owl. And the pigeon is a pompous, inflated bird. That's why Edward Heath came to mind, because he had that big thing he had in his neck. The waffly Edward Heath style from the 70s. And then Christopher Hitchens, when he was old, also had this weird hanging neck thing. Jowly neck thing. which gives the voice this kind of sound. So that's Laurie.
She's giving the pigeon this kind of... It's called satire. ..pompous, inflated, bulging sound. It's interesting how it builds, isn't it? Because to begin with, you're introduced to urban animals. There's a fox, there's some... But then it suddenly builds and builds up to this crescendo at this point and the sort of fable and that. Yeah, I mean, for those, you know, those people here who share the burden of being British, you'll remember Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected. Maybe you won't. It's like a series of macabre fairy tales, you know, where people invite another people to dinner and then serve them somebody they've just murdered.
That kind of macabre, macabre tale. And Lynette's tales are like that. It's like people doing malevolent and malefic things to each other. But they were always these creatures that just observe. But in this case, the pigeon tries to bring the owl down to size. But the owl has its eyes on the prize, which is the field mouse. And there's a way in which clearly the owl is Lynette. the owl is Lynette because Lynette is an artist whose concentration and whose focus on her work is second to none nothing blocks her project and her practice and it's in a way
Zadie Smith has this interpretation of this fable in which the pigeon is Lynette's art student friends telling her to stop painting and who does she think she is to be a painter who do you think you are to to to compare yourself to you know sickert and velasquez you know you're just an artist like the rest of us so the the pigeon stands for the jealous and begrudging art student and the owl stands for linette and so that's one that's one way of yeah that's one interpretation the other interpretation which we like is that because the pigeon is the engineer of its own demise, i.e. the owl flies to get flies down to get the meal and then kills the pigeon stone dead. By mistake. Yeah so the
pigeon has gone in its own way, the pigeon has engineered its own death, the pigeon is has is to use a phrase hoist by its own petard and that is a fable of Britishness. That's that is Britain since 2016, right? Britain is the engineer of its own demise and we're all suffering from that engineered demise. I also thought about, there's this image of crows on the football pitches, goal mouths and these black crows, and that seems to have a kind of incongruity as well as being, obviously, they're just there. On the other hand, they're parallel worlds, football and crows.
And it seemed to fit with the fact that crucial to Lynette's practice is both painting and poetry. And there's that Lessing's thesis about the difference between painting and poetry, you know, that painting is space and poetry is temporal. and I wondered if that and yeah obviously that's with the moving image that changes and in this film it's almost like they are a bit like opposites fire and ice, the poetry and the painting yet they totally come together and you can, you know, they're equal in her work or something or they come together yet they don't come together Well the paintings are you know
the hand And the eye is creating these masses, these forces of colour and light. But then her words... And, you know, we've always worked with the voice, with vocality from day one. I used to do the voiceovers. I mean, I'm doing a bit with her in this work. But we've always worked with poetics. and you know as our friend Denise Verreira de Silva might call it poetics which is you know the poetical is a concept you know that she it's a complex concept as are all Denise's ideas
but the temporal I can yeah the temporal is true because it can you can switch constantly with the poetry and the poetry is kind of condensations of images if you like kind of and other forces so we asked her to rather than filming her in a studio and Lynette has always wanted to be in one of our works I mean she's somewhat of an actress I think she enjoys that's a kind of hidden talent that she has maybe. But she always, I think, wanted to sort of be in one of our works, maybe not as Lynette, but doing something.
But in this she was very much herself. And I was surprised in the studio that she got the, you know, she got the voiceover, the voice intonation and everything so fast. because it takes some time to have that kind of voice and to have a voice which also allows for the grain of the voice to kind of emerge. That's why we filmed her walking at night in parks, also because the poems were part of a series of poems called Plans for the Night, which we like because we like the idea of undergrounds.
So the sense of her kind of producing these thought spaces as she walks in a kind of rhythmic form was something we tried and we felt it worked. Yeah, I think one way of thinking about it is to say Lynette often says she paints what she can't write and she writes what she can't paint. But you could think of video as staging a kind of conversation between painting and poetry through a kind of choreography. And then you get these kinds of connections and disconnections
that you're talking about. You get these kind of asymptotic motions where the poetry seems to run alongside the poem. The poetry seems to run alongside painting without directly commenting on it. Like a commentary from a distance, but not a direct commentary. So you can create all kinds of apostrophic moments in which poetry seems to call out to painting, but in its own terms. And painting seems to invite poetic descriptions. And video, for us, is a kind of medium of convocation. Video is something that brings other art forms together.
That's what video is. That's part of why we do it. There's an inherent sociality to it. And we spend a lot of time staging kind of encounters between Etel Adnan, a poet who was simultaneously a painter, or Julius Eastman, a composer who was a pianist, who was an organist, who was... And a vocalist. Yeah, and a vocalist. And so we spend a lot of time working out how to make these encounters spark each other and generate some kind of intimacy without collapsing them onto each other.
Like holding onto their singularity, but insisting on their relationality. That's kind of, that's the videographic project. and the key is to change the scale at which you do that for each project. Yes, so you do very much that similarity, as you've said, with these artists you've worked with, particularly Lynette, because you're working with image, text, voice, etc. And I suppose the second half, the poetry is more in the day, isn't it? And the night, to begin with, that changes. And there's a moment after the first passage of the painting where, as you said at the beginning, where the image is obstructed by the body coming in and out,
so almost as if we can reconsider what our gaze means. But then before the poetry comes in, there's this moment where she steps back and you do get a sideways shot of her, an advantage of her looking back at the painting. What's that passage there? Yeah, because when video makers, no matter how small the crew are, video makers and filmmakers, they always promise that they'll only be in your space for an hour or two. When people say, can I film in your apartment? Can I film in your street? Can I film in your seminar room? And they're like, it's only going to be an hour or two. Of course you don't believe them, because they'll take all afternoon and they'll rearrange everything. That's that kind of colonising, territorialising impulse.
Even at the smallest level of video, there's just this desire to reconstruct a world around itself. And that's exactly what we decided and imposed on ourselves not to do. So Lynette has a studio in East London. She's been there since 2005. She's never let anybody film there ever in 17 years. so if we're in going in there we're not going to change anything we're not going to go in there like the bbc or the new york times or the new york or any of these bozos and start rearranging everything and occupying lynette's world that's ridiculous and so we're not going to do it about where her mom and dad are from yes we're not going to do it so instead you go into lynette's space
and you take it as it is and so what that means is lynette has piles of stuff here and there because it's her world and it's private to her. It's not ours, it's hers. We're intruding. So that meant there's a lot of awkward scenes where we're squeezed up against the constraints of her studio space. So a lot of those scenes where Lynette steps back and observes the canvas, that's like a very small perimeter of them. It's a very small frame we have to move in. So the camera is extremely constrained and contained
and part of the art is accepting those constraints and even in a way letting them direct your actions. So instead of imposing your direction on a studio space You let the studio constraints direct what is possible and what is not. So these sideways shots are a key example of that. We're very inspired, like many artists, by Straub and Wille. And when they make the chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, they're going into Bach's house, of course, which is made before cameras. and so you get these extremely awkward shots where they're filming Gustave Leinhardt at his clavicle and he's playing away
and it's extremely awkward corner shots those kinds of shots tell you that the camera the camera which is used to dominating and revealing with this huge zoom lens He's always used to a kind of panoptical capacity to reveal everything. It's the other way around. It's like, no, Lynette's space, Lynette's terms are going to start dictating a lot of what the camera frame can see so that you feel a kind of spatial pressure, which is a kind of pulse running through the work
which you pick up after a while and that's heightened because we work with a brilliant editor Mariko who's sensitive to that isn't she this kind of spatial pressure and time pressure as the camera is squeezed into certain frames and Keita DP both women Keita Director of Photographies is she's a kind of choreographer as well. So she can work inside these spaces. But they're awkward and deliberately so. I mean, Tojo talked about the studio. Yes, I mean, the amount of fashion labels that want a piece of black artists are amazing.
The amount of interest there is by Gucci or the pressure that Lynette has been put under, So not only Lynette, but many other emerging young black artists through the kind of various different art world kind of, kind of, I mean, whatever. The amount of pressure, you know, that they are put under to kind of produce this sort of, I don't know, remedial quality for capitalism, for the industry, is horrendous. So, I mean, Lynette has really refused all that crap, which we are also very proud of. you know um and therefore you know to for us to for her to kind of i mean i mean it's quite a thing
you know we were in there for like four days like eight hours a day um doing all these different this is not a big studio like koja says and she really kept her composure you know it wasn't like oh have you got that bit right she was like in the like just we stopped for lunch an hour eight she went back into it and it and we had to be totally silent um sensitive to the sounds that were being made by all these delivery drivers and and all these and the brush and all these kind of interruptions and you know all these worlds we wanted them to kind of exude so we just had to sit there like quietly um but she I was amazed by the interiority she even produces
within herself while we are watching her there was a kind of strength in her that I found as I mean as a friend I have found her to be a strong friend like as a friend she's a good friend she's a strong friend she's not an extractive friend there's nothing like that going on it's just friendship um and so i was proud to see her because she's you know a bit younger than us and we've known her since the beginning really but i'm proud to see that she's kept her composure in this kind of horrible world bettina's giving us the nod the five minute nod i was just gonna say it's interesting that you said she doesn't make portraits but neither is this a portrait in a way which I like that you know. Absolutely
I think she's she left the world of portraiture behind a long time ago and in a way she sets a trap for recognition identification you know it's possible to to work with realistic effects for non-realistic non-realistic outcomes and that's kind of what she's doing I think And certainly in our project, she wasn't painting for the camera. She was painting in spite of the camera. She wasn't painting for us. She wasn't showing off. Because she's mastered painting, to use a masculine term.
But her main objective is not us. And so that's quite humbling. actually, and it's actually also inspiring because, of course, you know, while we're doing this work and while she's doing her work, you know, Britain is going to hell in the proverbial handcart, you know. And so all the things that we keep out of the frame, all the things that Lynette keeps out in order to do her work, they all come crashing back in sonically in the closing credit sequence. So then, in a way, it's a timeline of the production
process. And clearly, it's a timeline of a system in a certain kind of capitalist decay, a certain system only capable of generating multiple crises and only capable of continually immiserating the British public. And so all of that starts to flood back in. It does, doesn't it? Yeah. I think we have time for a few questions or responses. There's the lady there. about some of the other subjects you took as a start for work.
And I'm curious to see what difference or similarities in approach, process, intention between this film and, let's say, pieces with Etel Adnan and the Marine Project. Etel Adnan. Etel Adnan's project is really similar. It was filmed in her apartment in Paris, except, of course, Etel being in her late 80s... 90s. She was 90s. Yeah, so of course, Attell could only read for maybe two hours a day. So we would be there for five hours. Maybe another similarity is that Attell reads a poem, but the video that emerges is not a document of a poem. On the contrary, it's a poem reconstructed according
to the requirements of video. So it's a video poem that doesn't exist in any book. Similarly, Lynette's paintings, in a way, we are decomposing the compositional process, trying to thwart the kind of the triumphant narrative arc where you see the big reveal of the finished work, and in a way trying to continually show the scales of abstraction. Every painter knows this sense of weighing up, weighing the paint, like the forces of gravity and colour in the fields of paint,
the regions, the districts, the zones, the junctions, the borders. every painter understands how putting colour together changes the weight and the feeling and the mass and the motion of that canvas. And in a way, that's what we wanted to do. We always say that the work is not so much about making Lynette the object of attention. What we wanted to do was make her attention the object of our attention and then invite the audience to pay attention to how we pay attention to how she pays attention. So what we wanted to do was create these three levels of attention and create a kind of third-order video,
a recursive video in which you gain this awareness of what it is you're being invited into. And I think that was there in earlier works, but here it's heightened. Thank you for that. That's a really good question. Thank you. Sorry. It's more of a, thank you very much as well, but more of a comment, which is when you talk about the sort of, I guess the sort of dialogue between all these different gazes, it really makes me think of like an Ars Poetica, where a poem, where you write about writing a poem, but I've struck so much by the force in the scenes where she's painting that that's actually what I feel most left with is her,
not the physical force, but the sort of intention and then to end with, I guess, the sort of, as you put it, the decay. I feel that the force comes through, even though we're left with that sort of sonic, I don't know, composition of what she is not hearing but also what she is riling against. And I just I felt that was it was such a great moment to turn it around on itself and put it back in and bring it out somewhere else. I don't know. So thank you very much. It was really great. Thank you. Boris. I have a question. I know you've worked for a while. So at the end of all the darkness
the knowledge which comes after everything ends and in Judaism it's evil and blackness and uncanny but you are always so gentle so someone can call it you know poetics but you're always gentle in negativity in a protest so can you tell me something more about this like you're gentle you know like you being gentle like why? playing the British at their own game no I I think you it's an old strategy I don't know isn't it something like ontological also knowing you like people yeah it's become ontological I think we
we're extremely sensitive to the burden of transgression or the expectation of transgression the presupposition of transgression that artists of colour are expected to play in the theatre of cultural practice we see it all around us and we ourselves are continually tempted by it as are all artists of colour and the gentleness that you talk about is a certain kind of oblique strategy that we've developed for managing expectations and presuppositions,
which we think of as traps. we have to spring those traps traps which are designed by predators who have observed our behaviour and who have created a lethal parody of our actions and qualities and attributes just as a hunter sets a trap for a rabbit by studying the appetites of a rabbit and creates a lethal portrait of a rabbit that will catch the rabbit and kill it. So our gentleness is in the knowledge of those traps.
Let's say it's a gentleness in the shadow of predation. But I also think that all the great... Britain is a very literary place, has been a literary home for this kind of writing by black and Asian writers for like 200 years. So, you know, I think the loudness of the written form, you know, also is kind of very much present. Or the challenge when we put, when we come coming out of that history in relation to how we begin to sonify the complexity of that kind of quietude, that quiet loudness. You know, I mean, so many writers, you know,
who have written about their experiences, you know, Dambutsa Marisher, whose quote we have in the installation, you know, people like Hanif Qureshi and many, many others. So, yeah, maybe I think that's also probably part of our formation. I'm sorry to interrupt but I think we really have to continue with the opening so I ask all of you thank you very much for your attention thank you very much for this applause