The duo behind Otolith talk about their complex collaged videos, which tackle everything from lost utopian thinking to the concept of vertical time. Why do they think the apocalypse is already here?
Watching the video art of the Otolith Group feels like a productive day spent in a university library, or a jump down a Wikipedia wormhole. Images, archive film and original footage filmed on a vast array of locations are collaged together into essayistic treatises on history, the environment, colonialism and lost utopian thinking. Tangents are unravelled and opaque connections are made. The nature of time is a recurring obsession.
Speaking to them ahead of their forthcoming exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art is no less an education. Their answers, like the work in the show, incorporate a rich tapestry of academic and literary quotations, poetry and lyrics. “We are nothing but that infinity of traces. It’s a Gramscian thing,” co-founder Kodwo Eshun says, referring to the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci. “And those traces show up as citations and quotations in our work. That’s how we think. It goes with the desire to socialise and to think more collectively. It puts us into a larger frame than the present.”
