Medium Earth is an audiovisual essay based on sensual and poetic images of Southern California’s landscape, where seismic forces intermingle with ecological culpability. The work’s experimental format of a filmic notebook corresponds to its speculative exploration into the future of earthquake-prone California and the infrastructural unconscious of capitalism. Fleetingly reinterpreting the readings of fault lines and calligraphies of expansion cracks, the film destabilizes the heuristic practices of explaining and predicting activities that unfold above and beneath the terrestrial shell. It gives rise to an imaginative language that speaks in parallel to the opacities of organic life and to the ambitions of terraforming; how human life projects expectations on the fabric of a living planet and breeds with it promises.
Through its carefully composed imagery, the work listens to California’s desert, deciphers marks and traces of the landscape, and focuses on the ways in which tectonic forces express themselves. “Who does the Earth think it is?” asks a soft-spoken voice that accompanies the visuals. “We are sinking below its crust into the plates colliding, forming new mountains.” It seems as if the voice that accompanies the visuals is coming from a “medium” whose body is sensitive to seismic occurrences. The notion of medium corresponds both to techniques through which humans make the Earth speak, intelligible regimes of tellurian, terrestrial, and ecological languages, and also to the Earth itself, communicating through forms of weather, earthquakes, or lightning. Evoking an animistic perception of the Earth, this poetic surveying of a silently turbulent landscape pushes the cinematic frame of time against the larger, evolving background of bio- and eco-temporalities.
Founded by Kodwo Eshun (b. 1967, London) and Anjalika Sagar (b. 1968, London) in 2002, The Otolith Group’s multifaceted artistic practice brings together a wide range of resources and archival materials, moving images, audio, and sound. They work within and without the genre of the essay film, invoking the tradition of collective filmmaking in order to rethink the dynamics of image production under today’s accelerated yet precarious conditions. AM
self-presentation:
Scenes from An Endless Suddenness
Listening to Leela Gandhi’s lecture on Fernando Pessoa’s essays on Mohandas Gandhi at CASCO… sitting in a café at 3am listening to Hype Williams’ Badmind for the first time… reading a photocopy of Laboria Cubonik’s Manifesto for Alienation…Listening to Carles Guerra as he stands beside Voyages by Marc Karlin during the guided tour of 1979: A Monument to Radical Instants at La Verreina, Barcelona… listening to Julius Eastman’s Evil Nigger over and over…listening to Rosalind Morris lecturing on Imperial Pastoral at Studium Generale…Reading the Soft Power Desire Machines and the Production of Africa Rising map in The Chronic New Cartographies issue…listening to Annette Peacock’s I’m the One…watching the opening scenes of Mani Kaul’s Uski Roti…watching the opening scenes of Sue Clayton and Jonathan Curling’s The Song of the Shirt…listening to E.T. Mensah’s Ghana Guinea Mali at Open School East selected by Fred Moten for An Endless Suddenness…
