Otolith 1

IN THE YEAR 2103, Usha Adebaran-Sagar, off-world paleoanthropologist, will imagine our conflicted present through the journal of her ancestor Anjalika Sagar Sagar (sä`gər), city (1991 pop. 257,119), Madhya Pradesh state, central India. Sagar is a regional market for wheat, cotton, and oilseed. Such industries as sawmilling, oil, and flour milling are important. , focusing in particular on entries dating from the fraught spring of 2003. Musing on the protests against the American invasion of Iraq, Anjalika writes that it is as if the unprecedented nature of the massive global demonstration could through its very unlikeliness turn the inevitable into the possible --that is, into the merely possible, as opposed to the foreordained-- long enough to alter our fate. Rather than resignedly concede that America did in fact invade Iraq, and with disastrous results, Otolith, 2003--an enchanting sci-fi-cum-documentary film by the eponymous Otolith Group--projects a subversive charge back into the past. According to the film s destabilized and destabilizing notion of time, our present is far less certain than it might seem. A collaboration between London-based artist-theorists Kodwo Eshun and the aforementioned Anjalika Sagar, the Otolith Group, founded in 2002, regularly undertakes such fascinating inquiries into the relativity of time--investigations founded on the understanding that the deepest engagement with reality necessarily verges on the fictional. In this vein, extending as it does from the early twenty-second century back to the mid-twentieth and casting our present into deep relief, their film links disparate temporalities via a montage of archival imagery and documentary footage. Its multiple valences are threaded together by Usha s poetic voice-over (performed by Sagar), which mixes her own words with excerpts from the journals. While ranging over several remarkable intergenerational and cross-cultural convergences, Otolith s central point of crystallization is a real-life meeting in 1973 in Moscow between the Russian cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman to travel into outer space, and Sagar s grandmother, who was president of the National Federation of Indian Women. Vintage 16-mm footage of cheering women in assembly, and of Tereshkova in parades and at official receptions, is screened at different speeds, perceptually disrupting time s seemingly irrevocable continuity. The meeting between Sagar s grandmother and Tereshkova occurred in the midst of euphoric excitement over space travel, which mirrored burgeoning hopes for Indian socialism and its new era of women s rights. In a present in which left-wing collective organization is dogged by defeatism, such utopianism looms in the political landscape like a historical ruin.