INFINITY MINUS INFINITY | THE OTOLITH GROUP
September 27 | 2 - 3 PM |
VIRTUAL SCREENING | RSVP at rsvp@saag.ca
$5 | FREE with SAAG PASS

INFINITY minus Infinity draws on several inspirations: the modernist verse of the Jamaican poet Una Marson, the alluvial invocations of the Martinican philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant, the black feminist poetics of the Brazilian philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva, and the racial formation of geology theorised by British geographer Kathryn Yusoff amongst others in order to envision a black feminist cosmos animated by the principles of mathematical nihilism.

The phrase “hostile environment” invokes the covert policy of targeting migrants enacted by the UK Conservative government since 2014. It stands for the criminalization of the Afro-Caribbean women and men that migrated to Britain in the 1950s to help reconstruct its industrial infrastructure after the war. The recent effort to detain and deport the women and men of the “Windrush generation”—so called because they followed in the wake of the men that emigrated to Britain from the Caribbean on board the HMS Empire Windrush in 1948—reveals the commitment of the British State to disarticulating the forms of attachment and belonging of Afro-Caribbean settlement that helped decolonize the British empire from within.

INFINITY minus Infinity extends its confrontation with the Tory policy of the ongoing hostile environment into an interscalar movement between times and spaces. It brings together dance, performance, music, recital, and digital animation to compose a transhistorical zone in which the unpayable debts of racial capitalism cannot be separated from the ongoing crimes of climate catastrophe.

INFINITY minus Infinity enacts the past distress, present duress and future dread of the British Capitalocene through the assembly of a chorus of transtemporal deities whose utterances, expressions, gestures, and movements allude to the accumulated times and spaces of the United Kingdom’s environmental hostility. The film confronts the compounded timelines of the afterlife of slavery enacted by British imperial capitalism with the forces and the fictions of 21st Century black feminist digital cosmology. Commissioned by Sharjah Architecture Triennial SAT01. Co-produced with Z33 House for Contemporary Art, Design and Architecture.

THE OTOLITH GROUP was founded in 2002 and consists of Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun who live and work in London. During their long standing collaboration The Group have drawn from a wide range of resources and materials. The group’s work is research based and spans the moving image, audio, performance, installation, and curation. The Canadian premiere of this event is hosted by LUX Moving Image, an international arts agency that supports and promotes artists’ moving image practices and the ideas that surround them.

2019 | 57 mins