Following the screening of the films Hydra Decapita (2010) and Medium Earth (2013), by the Otolith Group, there will be a conversation between Kodwo Eshun, Anjalika Sagar and João Ribas, Deputy Director of the Serralves Museum.
Capacity: 200
Access: free
Hydra Decapita
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 an underwater country populated by the unborn children of pregnant women thrown overboard during the middle-passage of slave ships across the Atlantic. In this 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.
Medium Earth
An accumulation of moving images and sounds, Medium Earth is an audio-visual essay on the millennial time of geology and the infrastructural unconscious of Southern California. Focused on the ways in which tectonic forces express themselves in boulder outcrops and the hairline fractures of cast concrete, Medium Earth participates in the cultures of prophecy and forecasting that mediate the experience of seismic upheaval. The desire to evoke the hidden substrata of the planet gives way to a morphological interpretation of the face of the earth. As an experiment in channelling the system of fault lines buried below California, Medium Earth animates the stresses and strains of physical geographies undergoing continental pressures.
