Monday, November 2nd, 2020, 7pm
ZONE 2
Kodwo Eshun in conversation with CCC RP Students
HEAD – Genève, Boulevard Helvétique 9, 1205 Geneva, seminar room CCC, salle 27, 2nd floor
Image: Gradient based on live data: London, 2020-10-27 07:00:00 . Temperature: 7.9°, Pressure: 1001, Humidity: 91. Air Quality Index (AQI): co 1.9, no2 11.9, o3 11.8, pm10 10, pm25 53, so2 6.1.
Living through the compounded catastrophe of the COVID-19 pandemic confronts us with the confusing inexperience of inhabiting a capitalist crisis whose global scale is insensible in its abstraction and painful in its confrontation with mortality.
Such is the starting point for ZONE 2, 2020, directed by The Otolith Group, the artistic collaboration of which Kodwo Eshun is a co-founder. ZONE 2 composes a portrait of the local gestures, rituals and landscapes of East London as its human and non-human inhabitants struggles to adapt to life under non-local quarantine. It draws together a study of prophylactic practices and ceremonies with passages devoted to the nature reserves of the Walthamstow Wetlands and London’s earliest abolitionist cemetery.
Following the screening of ZONE 2, we will discuss the ways in which science fiction can be treated as a practice of theory-fiction that works as a method, an object of analysis, a source of inspiration and a site of critique for contemporary creative, critical and curatorial practices. ZONE 2 was commissioned by the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin as part of their online program CC: World.
Kodwo Eshun is a filmmaker, artist and theorist who currently teaches Theory Fiction at the CCC RP of the Visual Arts Department at HEAD Genève and co-directs the Visual Cultures PhD Seminar at the Department of Visual Cultures Goldsmiths, University of London. Eshun is co-founder of The Otolith Group whose works explores the interscalar convergence of racial capitalism and the Capitalocene. The Otolith Group’s travelling exhibition Xenogenesis is on display at Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge, Canada from 26.09. 2020 to 15.11. 2020.Hydra Decapita(2010) is displayed at Tate Britain as part of Turner’s Modern Worldfrom 28.10. 2020 to 07. 03. 2021