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Screening and debate

This session entails a discussion that will introduce and contextualise the ideas and methodologies behind The Otolith Group's practice as they present the research they have gathered for the second in their new trilogy of films Hydra Decapita (working title), which will be produced by the MACBA. The two members of the group, Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun, will be joined by the historian Marcus Rediker who is professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is author of Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea and coauthor of The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, which won the International Labor History Association Book Prize in 2001. He lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and is at work on a history of the slave ship. The event will be moderated by Alex Farquharson, director of The Nottingham Contemporary.

This session will explore the conceptual framework that underlies the piece by The Otolith Group and the exhibition Hidrarquia produced by the LOOP Festival in collaboration with the Museu Marítim) and, more specifically, the abstraction of financial capitalism in order to explore the correspondences with the bottom-up revolution in the Black Atlantic.

Debate with Anjalika Sagar, Kodwo Eshun and Marcus Rediker.

Co-produced with:
Loop
The Otolith Group "Hydra Decapita", 2010 (filmstill)

Programme

Saturday May 21 from 10.30 am to 2 pm

10h30 Keynote - Marcus Rediker
This lecture by historian, writer and activist Marcus Rediker will discuss the history of the social struggles at sea in the era of the transatlantic slave trade as first articulated in The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Beacon Press/Verso, 2000). It will use this history as a starting point for reflection on the Otolith Group's film Hydra Decapita, treating the themes of violence and oppression, resistance and emancipation, crisis and memory.
11h30 Presentation - The Otolith Group
The Otolith Group will present a series of speculations on questions of hydropolitics and hydroaesthetics that emerge from Hydra Decapita (2010), the first work in the Group's new trilogy. These speculations constitute a partial inventory of preoccupations and obsessions that occupy the Group's work and continue to feed their fascinations; an unidentified number of these preoccupations and these obsessions have inspired and continue to inspire, obliquely, the forms of thinking of work to come.

12h30 Panel discussion
With Marcus Rediker and the Otolith Group, moderated by Alex Farquharson (Director, Nottingham Contemporary).

MACBA Public Programs
Tel. (+34) 93 412 14 13
programespublics [at] macba [dot] cat

Related

Images

The Otolith Group "Hydra Decapita", 2010 (filmstill)

Audios

Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun (The Otolith Group) in conversation with Chus Martínez
FONS ÀUDIO #7. The Otolith Group
10.05.2011
Son[i]a #120.
10.02.2011