⁰¹⁻⁰² The Otolith Group, Otolith, 2003, installation shot at Gasworks A Long Time Between Suns, 2009. Photo: Matthew Booth.
⁰³ The Otolith Group, Otolith II, 2007, film still. Courtesy of the artists.
⁰⁴ Lindsay Seers, It has to be this way 2009, video still. Courtesy of the artist and Matt’s Gallery, London.

A collective of London exhibitions and their sub-events in the past three months have attempted to be repeatedly asking concerns on the interpretation of the document and its futurity. Recent works by The Otolith Group, Lindsay Seers, Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska seem to have developed a space-time continuum where the production of film and cinematographic metaphors establish a tension between memory, artifact and narratives.

Initially, a presentation at Gasworks by Mark Fisher and Justin Barton of their audio-essay LondonunderLondon (an event devised by The Otolith Group to coincide their exhibition A Long Time between Suns) has led me to alight upon the logic of the pre-archive. Fisher's & Barton’s radiophonic terrains of postwar London determine a longing for immediacy of memory and perception, reconfiguring the archival moment and its repetitive nature. ‘Is there such a thing as a pre-archival moment?’, Ruth Mclennan asks in her letter to Uriel Orlow on 28 July 2004. [ii] On the surface it is strange to imagine the every day without an index of recognisable events and repeated gestures. I can recall what I am familiar with. Anything new is automatically indexed by memory only to familiarise it in a future existence. In their book of collected emails, photographs and keywords, Re: the archive, the image, and the very dead sheep, Mclennan and Orlow open up a conversation about history as a series of recordings, some encrypted in the depths of phenomenology and others received as versions of readings.

The document’s power exists in all varied forms of telling, regardless its general perception as the body that exists and its eventual position to an organised archival system. These forms, either ‘conjuring’ the subject or ‘showing’ it, are marks of survival. They are channels of history be it ephemeral (via speech and coincidences) or permanent (as pure existing artifacts). The question of the ‘pre-archival moment’ in Mclennan’s letter coins a less objective power than the document itself as concrete material evidence. To this Orlow responds, ‘What is an image that conjures up a subject (a person, a location, an event) rather than showing it (which would be just another form of telling)? Perhaps this image would re-enact the pre-archival moment, where the document has a magical power, which can neither be stored nor retrieved (therefore exists before language, before the list, the classification, the catalogue). But it can be recognized.’ [ii]

Recently, I had the rare opportunity to watch the one-off screening at the Tate Modern, Starr Auditorium of the Georges Perec’s and Bernard Queysanne’s 1974 film Un homme qui dort (The Man Who Sleeps) [iii]. The screening was organised by the Tate as part of a film programme that includes four of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s films and other titles that have informed her work/shelter TH. 2058 — the last project of The Unilever Series at the Turbine Hall. Adapted from Perec’s 1967 novel of the same title, Une homme qui dort celebrates the enigmatic, edgy consciousness and what it is to live. Charting the waking and sleeping routine in the life of a sociology student, the film’s sharp exposition of black and white imagery of Paris and Shelley Duvall's narration, question what it is to be conscious in the shadow of what surrounds him. Apart from its convincing mare look to what might be to sleep, Perec's text in the language of cinema transforms the city to a hypnotic stillness where the everyday becomes monumental and epic like its skyscraper views, debris and deserted streets.

Also seen in a more recent film, Godard’s Eloge de l’amour, 2001, the monumental becoming of the everyday is a form of telling that both conjures and shows a situation. Perec and Queysanne dive in this monumental spectacle. What it is to be mute emotionally is a gesture that is probed out of Duvall’s narration in Un homme qui dort. It is also transparent in Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster's explorations of tropicality in her Parc Central, 2006, that retraces locations director Jia Zhang Ke used for the making of Still Life, 2006, in Taipei. Mclennan wrote to Orlow from her studio in London. Remembering her last trip to the northerly edge of mainland Britain, she imagined being in the ruined prehistoric house looking out to the Orkneys. The image sheltered in memory, I would have thought, is the ‘pre-archival moment’, in Mclennan’s words that is the image that conjures as Orlow remarks. It is perhaps the moment of consciousness questioned in Un homme qui dort and the moment of tropicality explored in Parc Central.

The archive, like memory and fabrics of consciousness, has the recognisable characteristic of unveiling a lot more questions than it is capable to answer. Its chaotic nature and possibilities has enriched moving image works, audio and other forms of creative futures. To name a few, Alain Resnais’s 1956 short film Toute la memoir du monde as well as Uriel Orlow’s and Ruth Maclennan’s 2004–05 film Satellite Contact are distinguished moving image portraits of the archive’s physical reality at the French National Library and the British National Archives (formerly known as the Public Records Office) respectively. Also Douglas Gordon’s video installation Trigger Finger, 1994, and the Quay Brothers’ short film The Phantom Museum, 2003, are preambles for the use of archived material. In this instance, the Sir Henry Wellcome’s anatomical and pathological collections which Gordon and the Quay Brothers have referred to for an exploitation of human memory and our experience of the world. Suddenly these examples demonstrate the document’s force in images, heritage, circulation and psychological conditions.

While these forces are vibrant commandments in Derrida’s Archive Fever, the question remains what is the vision of the monumental social landscape and its futurity that is sheltered in the pre-archival moment of the subconscious by simply living? On the other hand, what it takes to identify the physical dynamic of archive material in film vaults with the archivist, researcher and artist? And what it takes to identify the force between works like Corbusier’s 1963 architectural project for Chandigarh and Xenakis's early 1970s electro-acoustic work Polytope de Cluny and their juxtaposition with the utopian state of imagination as opposed to real states of becoming? Perhaps the answers are in Benjamin’s 1935 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction but the idea of identifying the force of content of some current artistic productions in relation to the world now becomes all the more compelling.

The two venue solo exhibition by The Otolith Group, A Long Time between Suns, currently showing the first part at Gasworks in London, is a display of the group’s Otolith trilogy. At Gasworks, Otolith, 2003, and Otolith II, 2007, are screened in the productive environment designed by Will Holder. Holder collates archival material from group conversations between the artists and curators that are later tacked on pin board panels and compiled in a series of artist books to be taken away by the exhibition visitor. Both The Otolith Group’s and Will Holder’s works interweave stages of archive productivity as a series of events, dialogues and historic mementos with the pathos of futurity.

Set in the fictional 2103 when the human race only exists outside Earth’s gravity, on an International Space Station, the first film in The Otolith Group’s trilogy features the future descendent of Anjalika Sagar (Otolith Group member) researching expired life on Earth via collected media archives. Otolith conjures images from the 2003 anti Iraq War demonstration held in London, recorded material from the missions of Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova and non-alignment footage from the WWII era, re-enacting the living through the chance of document retrieval by Dr Usha Adebaran Sagar. Cut through a montage of archive film, media documentary and fictional narration the film becomes the imaginary landscape of the 22nd Century as the metaphor of historical currents and present affairs.

On a more intimate level, Otolith II explores visions of a closer future and the life of inhabitants living in the present cities of tomorrow by using archive film footage of Chandigarh and Mumbai. As Kodwo Eshun explains in an interview for Sight & Sound magazine, the film features “two very different versions of the city, Chandigarh for it’s a relic of a future and Dharavi, a terrible mega-slum, a land of cruelty but also opportunity, industry and labour.” [iv] The holding shots of workers’ activities in Otolith II, embroidering and making living solutions also taking a break within formless spaces stacked to each other, are central in the 47-minute-long film. The audience shares the longing and deprivation in overcrowded urban populations that in turn lives through what is constructed a state of becoming a city of the future.

Previously seen in Destroy Athens, 1st Biennial of Athens, and other international exhibitions including Documenta 12, Kassel, and the 3rd Tate Triennial, The Otolith Group re-uses the archive to unveil memories and actual events that have resulted into odysseys of fictional landscapes. As with their Inner time of television (featured in Destroy Athens) that made Chris Marker’s, 13 part series of The Owl’s Legacy, 1989, available for viewing for the first time by Greek audiences, the group’s work adopts essayistic qualities that potentially enrich the public domain with questions of accessibility and freedom of public demand in interacting with true events. Noteworthy, The Owl’s Legacy series bear the potentials and afterlives of Ancient Greece with guest speakers including expatriates such as political philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis and singer Angelique Ionatos as well as composer Iannis Xenakis and novelist Vassilis Vassilikos who were both forced into exile.

The Otolith’s narrative following the fictional character Dr. Usha Adebaran Sagar has a strong similarity to Lindsay Seers’s step-sister Christine Parks who is obsessed by the Swedish Queen Christina in It has to be this way, 2009, Seers’s solo and first exhibition at Matt’s Gallery. Consisted of a sculptural installation housing a double-screen video projection of the main film, two further documentary video works (at the rear side of the installation and the reception area) and a book authored by M. Anthony Penwill, It has to be this way is a fictional work about Christine who after a motorcycle accident she suffers by memory loss and goes missing in Rome in 2005. Drawing on concepts of philosophy, science and photography as experience, Seers very personal narrative is initially perceived with doubt as to whether the story that is told is true. Though there is nothing in the exhibition to identify Christine’s fictional character, the audience becomes strangely involved in a journey of reality play where the camera captures the essence of events.

From the press release we are told that Seers’s recent visit to Stockholm aimed at photographing anything associated and connected to her step-sister, Christine, for reconstructing a historical past where people and events have been connected to each other. The enigmatic character of the final work It has to be this way and its literacy between image and text, narrated by another character in the film only known as S, reminds us the impact cinematic and photographic means of communication shape our memory. In both Otolith and It has to be this way memory is tied to future potential rather than the past that is already lost. This exposition of the lost past surpasses the idea of the archive as we know it now. It becomes a meta-archive opening up countless possibilities for a profoundly new cinematic experience.

Contrary to Dominic Gonzalez-Foerster’s TH.2058, where the Turbine Hall has become the shelter of Londoners for an unstoppable rain that befalls in 2058, both The Otolith Group's and Lindsay Seers’s pieces occur freely through a montage of available media material, without the limitations of an already existed complete work. In a more institutional shift Gonzalez-Foerster is more interested in the exhibition space versus domestic space relationship and dialogues established via the different narratives explored from buildings, sounds and light. The possibilities of architecture in her work are revealed through the exploration of space potentialities and multiple moments of reference specifically in cinema, literature and artworks that have preoccupied her over the last twenty years. Yet, the archive gains the sole and possibly only characteristic of reference that becomes a work of continuation for an existing story. Though, it is left entirely to the audience to make the connection between the quotations that underlie TH.2058; between Alexander Calder's Flamingo and Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point alongside Catherine Dufour’s Le Goût de l’immortalité and Arto Lindsay’s The 1958 Song. Or is it that the references in TH.2058 develop into ready-made objects connecting to each other through simply being familiar?

In another form of reference use, the Wilsons’ Unfolding the Aryan Papers installation at the BFI Southbank Gallery, concentrates on newly shot footage of Johanna ter Steege, the female lead character of Kubrick’s unfinished passion film Aryan Papers. Since the acquisition of Stanley Kubrick’s archive by the University of Arts London, Jane & Louise Wilson took up a ten-day research commission from Animate Projects, funded by the BFI and Channel 4, to construct their own project. The finished work looked at Kubrick's ten years of research about his Aryan Papers project on the Holocaust, especially the wardrobe and phase stills from the film’s pre-production phase, based on Louis Begley’s 1991 book Wartime Lies. Researching the material available in the 60 boxes at the Stanley Kubrick archives, Unfolding the Aryan Papers is an assemblage of a recorded voiceover, film shots with ter Steege and Kubrick's wardrobe test recreations all edited with newsreel footage of Holocaust assaults.

The ghosting nature of the archive becomes alert in this last work by Jane & Louise Wilson where the exhibition space is not quite a cinema not quite a gallery. It is at the same time captivating to see how a new project develops through the wardrobes and other material of a film never accomplished before. The experience of the archive, as Jane Wilson puts it, becomes ‘drained, exhausted but fascinating’. Time becomes indifferent between now and then and between film, cinema and art. Hence the collapse of label restrictions and meaning through repetition i.e. art for galleries and film for cinemas.

Nevertheless, the medium of information, where it stops and where it starts, is central to the performance of knowledge. Deriving from memory and document, image and artifact and their inevitable path to the main machine of reference as the collection of a museum, the tension of production is yet to be proclaimed. What is it to make information available? The new and rather flat film by Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska, Museum Futures: Live, Recorded, Distributed, 2009, has carefully considered the failure of the institution towards a wider Moderna Museet network that participates in local ecologies restructuring resources. Art, Technology and Knowledge are central to a heritage ‘broadcast’ communication model that works via image server codecs of long-term equity contracts. If this sounds fictional, quite rightly Cummings and Lewandowska have speculated a future art model via a real-time corporate interview about embedded viral licenses of text, images and all public research in favor of Public Domain cultural initiatives. ‘Which is a possible scenario’, Cummings calls during a post-screening discussion at Cockpit Theatre.

Cumming’s and Lewandowska’s film may turn into a rescue metaphor to the debatable and risky use of reference in Gonzalez-Foerster’s TH.2058 for two reasons. First, the reference is rethought as the force of complex social process that pushes the transaction of a producing intensity. Second, the idea of the Turbine Hall, in 50 years time, as the citizen’s shelter in a time of despair is the best possible scenario for what predicted in Cumming’s and Lewandowska’s film, a heritage ‘broadcast’ communication model that would inevitable save the nation’s records of art, technology and science. Perhaps Museum Futures: Live, Recorded, Distributed comes to reflect a global despair in art and media circuits and their widespread anxiety towards the organisation of collection invulnerability.

The perpetual doubt in Lindsay Seers It has to be this way accompanies documentary similarities and questions of hidden qualities that are receptive to the audience’s reactions as a journey of fictional modes and insecurity of whether what we see is true or not. Her positioning as projector and the status of the camera as autobiography in her work, which is also transparent in her Extramission 4 (Black Maria), 2007, seen in this year’s Tate Triennial: ALTERMODERN, comment on realism, memory and the radical strangeness of different personas and preeminent narratives. We have nevertheless accepted the intensity of doubt in Otolith and we become adapted by Dr Usha Adebaran’s narration as possible participants in the 2003 anti Iraq War demonstration. But there are also other territories to explore in these works, such as the temporality of the image and its index, which make archive retrieval the obvious choice for the architecture of perception.

The character of the document has at times been glorified and elsewhere denied usually according to practicing powers. The essayistic qualities of Otolith II, as with the Inner time of television, influence an exciting aspect of the character of the document. This is imagination and social inclusion through which the work of art is understood and inspected as a critical and creative exploration instead of a reaffirmed artifact as such. Or in Neil Cummings words a ‘composite on social critique.’


Otolith III will be shown in June at A Long Time between Suns Part II, the inaugural exhibition for the reopening of The Showroom in London alongside a presentation of The Otolith Group trilogy at Il Trifoglio Nero, Genoa, until September 2009.


[i] Uriel Orlow & Ruth Maclennan, Re: the archive, the image, and the very dead sheep, UK: School of Advanced Study and The National Archives, 2004, p. A16.
[ii] Ibid, p. A21.
[iii] Un homme qui dort, Georges Perec and Bernard Queysanne, 1974, was part of the Tate Film programme, Memories of a Certain Time: Films for TH.2058 which was screened between 13–15 March 2009 at Tate Modern, Starr Auditorium. Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s talk took place on 12 March and it was a conversation between the artist and Pablo Leon de la Barra. The Unilever Series: Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster TH.2058 was on display until 13 April 2009.
[iv] Calling planet Earth, Isabel Stevens, Sight & Sound, April 09, volume 19, issue 4, p. 9.