RUN OF LIFE: The Otolith Group
BABBIT RESERVE MINING BLAST - an industrial film from our Jack Behrend Collection – gets the live soundtrack it deserves at this month’s installment of Run of Life - an experimental documentary series presented by Chicago’s favorite micro-cinema, the Nightingale. More info below via Run of Life:
THE RADIANT and PEOPLE TO BE RESEMBLING
by The Otolith Group
Screened in association with LUX
Preceded by BABBIT RESERVE MINING BLAST by Jack Behrend
Courtesy of Chicago Film Archives
With minimalist synth improvisation by Nick Broste, Kent Lambert, and Seth Vanek
Program Details
THE RADIANT(2012, HD video, 64 min)
Commissioned as part of dOCUMENTA (13) in 2012, The Radiant explores the aftermath of March 11, 2011, when the Tohoku earthquake triggered a tsunami that killed many thousands and caused the partial meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on the east coast of Japan. A film essay burdened by the difficult task of representing the invisible aftermath of nuclear fallout, The Radiant travels through time and space to invoke the historical promises of nuclear energy and the threats of radiation that converge in Japan’s illuminated cities and evacuated villages in the months immediately following the disasters. The Otolith Group’s cinematic document offers glimpses into the shape and presence of an unseen entity and its abstract manifestation through visual phenomena.
PEOPLE TO BE RESEMBLING (2102, HD video, 22min)
People To Be Resembling can be described as a five sided portrait of the methodologies of the post-free jazz, pre-world music trio Codona, founded by multi-instrumentalists Collin Walcott, Don Cherry, and Nana Vasconcelos in 1978. Consisting of stills by renowned photographers Roberto Masotti and Isio Saba, newly filmed and archival footage and original music performed by musician Charles Hayward, People to be Resembling reimagines the poetics of permutation that informed the sonic geography of the first Codona album recorded with ECM in September 1978. People to be Resembling returns to 1978 in order to redream the recording process at Tonstudio Bauer as a meditation upon the relations between visual anthropology, anti-colonial choreography, nuclear annihilation and Weltmusik. In its arrangement of positive and negative with colour and black and white and still and moving imagery, The Otolith Group’s People to Be Resembling stages an experiment in mnemonic cohabitation inspired by the visionary music of Codona.
The Otolith Group was founded in 2002 and consists of Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun who live and work in London. During their longstanding collaboration The Group have drawn from a wide range of resources and materials. They explore the moving image, the archive, the sonic and the aural within the gallery context. The work is research based and in particular has focused on the essay film as a form that seeks to look at conditions, events and histories in their most expanded form.