Single-channel video installation, 52 min. English.
The phrase “hostile environment” invokes the covert policy of targeting migrants enacted by the UK Conservative government since 2014. It stands for the criminalization of the Afro-Caribbeans that migrated to Britain in the 1950s to help with the reconstruction after the war. The recent effort to detain and deport the women and men of the “Windrush generation” – so called because they followed in the wake of the men that emigrated to Britain from the Caribbean on board the HMT Empire Windrush in 1948 – reveals the commitment of the British state to disarticulating the forms of attachment and belonging of Afro-Caribbean settlement that helped decolonize the British Empire from within.
INFINITY minus Infinity brings together dance, performance, music, recital, and digital animation to compose a transhistorical zone in which the unpayable debts of racial capitalism cannot be separated from the ongoing crimes of the climate catastrophe. It enacts past distress, present duress, and future dread through the assembly of a chorus of trans-temporal deities whose utterances, expressions, gestures, and movements personify the compounded, accumulated, irreparable times and spaces of the hostile environment.
The Otolith Group is an artist-led collective and organization founded by Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun in 2002 in London that integrates film and video making, artists’ writing, workshops, exhibition curation, publication, and developing public platforms for the close reading of the image in contemporary society. The group’s work is formally engaged with research-led projects exploring the legacies and potentialities of artist-led proposals around the document and the essay film, the archive, the aural and sonic medium, speculative futures, and science-fictions.
