Absence of a Certain Sound as Its Fundamental Presence: Hydra Decapita
The article examines the work of The Otolith Group (Kodwo Eshun, Anjalika Sagar). The work by this audiovisual duo is deeply interwoven with the French essay film of the 1960s (Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard) and the British essay film of the 1980s (John Akomfrah, Black Audio Film Collective). Hydra Decapita (2010) radicalizes the main characteristics of the genre of essay film. The Otolith Group intertwine the concepts of afrofuturism, posthumanism, abstraction, representation and financial capitalism. Through the paradoxical (un)merging of image and sound, Hydra Decapita radicalizes the tendencies of Jean-Luc Godard and the interwar Soviet montage theory. Essay film does not invent a non-existing world, but, with the construction of non-linear connections in the framework of potential and alternative realities, establishes and questions the truth of contemporaneity and history.
The integral version of this article can be found in the printed KINO!