Otolith Group’s film “INFINITY Minus Infinity” is the point of departure of the 5th edition of the podcast discussions for the series “Burning Futures: On Ecologies of Existence” with the title “Beyond the end of the world? Unacknowledged loss, racial capitalism and ecofictional futurity”.
Released at the end of 2019, “INFINITY Minus Infinity” reveals itself as a crucial film in order to grasp today’s historical context of racial capitalism and the resistance of Black Lives Matter movements. It confronts the compounded timelines of the afterlife of slavery enacted by British imperial capitalism with the forces and the fictions of 21st Century Black feminist digital cosmology.
The film brings together dance, performance, music, recital, and digital animation to compose a transhistorical zone in which the unpayable debts of racial capitalism cannot be separated from the ongoing crimes of the climate catastrophe – thus making clear that racial genocide and ecocide are both at the origins of the “Anthropocene”.
It draws on several inspirations: the modernist verse of the Jamaican poet Una Marson, the alluvial invocations of the Martinican philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant, the black feminist poetics of the Brazilian philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva, and the racial formation of geology theorised by British geographer Kathryn Yusoff amongst others in order to envision a Black feminist cosmos animated by the principles of mathematical nihilism.
