In 2012, the Franco-Lebanese American poet and artist Etel Adnan (1925–2021) published Sea and Fog, an epic poem that evokes these two physical elements as metaphors for power and the passage of time. Using this text, Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun, known as The Otolith Group, perform a reading of the first chapter, Sea. Recorded largely in Etel Adnan's Parisian apartment, the author's soft voice together with the ambient noise, quiet but present, create a powerful and meditative atmosphere. In her poem, Adnan notes the movement of the ocean and the continuous mutation of matter. The text moves from the sublime to violence, from Yosemite Valley to a soldier's jeep in the desert, from Dostoevsky to Leslie Scalapino: a book of poetic psalms that The Otolith Group turns into an experiment in concentration and a study of gestures, language and the ocean. The film is part of the trilogy produced by this group in 2012 around geopolitics and human history associated with the sea.