DXG 03: INFINITY minus Infinity (2020) screening and discussion
Amber Collective in conversation with Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun of The Otolith Group
Moderated by Andrea Phillips at BxNU
2 March 2022 | Time TBC GMT | Live & Online
BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead
︎︎︎Watch Online
On the 2nd March 2022, the third event in the DXG public programme will be a screening of the Otolith Group’s film work INFINITY minus Infinity. The screening and discussion will be hosted at the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead. The Amber Film & Photography Collective will be in conversation with the Otolith Group’s Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun, moderated by Andrea Phillips.
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. INFINITY minus Infinity 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.
INFINITIY minus Infinity was commissioned by Sharjah Architecture Triennial in 2019 and co-produced with Z33 House for Contemporary Art, Design and Architecture.
INFINITY Minus Infinity, The Otolith Group, watch trailer ︎︎︎
Other Events
