Country: UK
Year: 2010
Duration: 31'
The first installment in a trilogy of film essays, Hydra Decapita uses the imaginary world in the concept albums of Detroit-based techno duo Drexciya to comment on globalisation, capitalism and climate change. Drexciya is a mythological underwater country populated by the unborn children of pregnant women thrown overboard during the middle-passage of slave ships across the Atlantic. In this imaginary world, a new species has evolved through the children who survived, breathing and living underwater as they did in the womb. The constellation of historical and present day episodes within the essay explores the relationship between finance, death, abstraction and language.
Biography
film director
the Otolith Group
The Otolith Group is a collective founded in London in 2002 by Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun. Its work is based on experimentation with images in motion, archives, and sounds, to create coexistence between visual culture, contemporary art, and exhibition spaces. The collective’s works are displayed in galleries, museums, foundations, and biennials in England and throughout the world. The Otolith Group has curated film and contemporary art programs for London’s Tate Modern, such as A Cinema of Songs and People: The Films of Anand Patwardhan, The Inner Time of Television (a collaboration with Chris Marker), The Militant Image, The Ghosts of Songs: A Retrospective of The Black Audio Film Collective 1982-1998, and Harun Farocki. 22 Films: 1968-2009. In 2010 it was nominated for a Turner Prize.
FILMOGRAFIA
Otolith Timeline (cm, 2003), Otolith I (cm, 2003), Be Silent, for the Ears of God Are Eveywhere (cm, 2006), Otolith II (mm, 2007), Nervus Rerum (mm, 2008), Otolith III (mm, 2009), Communists Like Us (cm, 2010), Hydra Decapita (mm, 2010), Anathema (mm, 2011), People to Be Resembling (cm, 2012), The Radiant (2012), I See Infinite Distance Between Any Point and Another (mm, 2012), In the Year of the Quiet Sun (mm, 2013), Medium Earth (mm, 2013), Sovereign Sisters (cm, 2014), The Third Part of the Third Measure (mm, 2017).
