The Otolith Collective

D1L0 DeMille, Rasheedah Phillips' Black Women Temporal Portal (2019)

The Otolith Collective

Since 2002, Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar of The Otolith Collective have engaged in the conception and creation of platforms that make public the research that informs their artistic, theoretical and curatorial practice. Throughout this practice runs a precoccupation with shifting the decolonial form of the essayistic towards an idea of science fiction conceived as a method for investigating the present. From this aesthetico-political process emerges a practice of platform-making that draws attention to the urgency of the present in all of its provisional, prospective and planetary dimensions. It is the urgency of this differentiated Now that animates the Collective’s desire to platform the work of Chris Marker, Harun Farocki, Anand Patwardhan, Etel Adnan, Fred Moten, Eyal Sivan, Black Audio Film Collective, Peter Watkins, Sue Clayton, Mark Fisher and Justin Barton, Silvia Maglioni & Graeme Thomson, Lamia Joreige, Naeem Mohaiemen, Chimurenga Library, Emma Wolukau-Wanamba, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, Lungiswa Gqunta, Tony Cokes, Rania Stephan, Ayo Akingbade, Rehana Zaman and Onyeka Igwe throughout and beyond the UK. What unites these convenings and convocations is the necessity of bringing viewers face to face with the threat of images and the challenge of sounds so as to create the conditions for intervention in the colonised times and racialised spaces of our catastrophic present.