The Otolith Group’s In the Year of the Quiet Sun

Gee Wesley: This work tells a continent-spanning narrative through commemorative stamps, a form of disposable material culture that often goes overlooked. How did you come to see stamps as a key entry point into conveying what you’ve described as an “epic political project to change a continent and thereby change a world”? Where did this story start for you?

Kodwo Eshun: When you visit Accra, Ghana, as we did in 2013, you’re struck immediately by its independence architecture. Built between 1957 and ’61, these monumental structures, like Black Star Square and Independence Arch, are the most evident signs of the founding of the new nation-state of Ghana. But they also throw into stark relief the fact that there’s very little public or visual or material culture reflecting the founding of the First Republic of Ghana in 1960. That’s because the military coup in 1966 destroyed the material and public cultures of the First Republic. The absence of these visible signs is deliberate and not just a question of time, history, or age.

Our idea for this work began with an effort to think about how Ghana functioned as what American writer Richard Wright considered the pilot project for the new Africa. This eventually led us to realize that the military coup could not destroy the commemorative postage stamps that had been issued beginning in 1957, since they were already dispersed around the globe.

Postage stamps from this period confront you with the fact that Pan-Africanism was a genuine project that entailed the liberation of specific countries, which was a stage towards the liberation of the continent, which in turn was a stage in the unification of the continent. So what Pan-Africanism entails is an expansion of the political imagination about what is possible for African people to do and to become.

Part of the aim of this work is to reimagine the future of Pan-Africanism, which was terminated, and to reconstruct the values of that project. Once we clarified this intention, we began to assemble the postage stamps in order to narrate the imagined United States of Africa. That’s what you see in the video.

Anjalika Sagar: I think the expansion of Pan-Africanism exists in many forms. The postage stamp is a traveling image which enables us to think about a wider field of images and sounds that were linked to the pictorial sense of the nation—its mountain ranges, its rivers, its waterfalls, its birds, its flowers, its heavy industry, its airports, its universities. The stamps also depict an international kind of state system that is new, and full of hope and potential. We came to think about this work as a result of a longer project linked to our interest in Third Cinema, the essay film, and the histories of our families being socialists and communists, and exploring these ideas in Ghana and in India. I think of the postage stamp as a moving image that left Ghana, left various countries in Africa, and traveled.

I’m interested in how this work situates images as central to the projects of state-building and nation-building. Can you talk about how this work shaped your thinking about these two concepts, and also the third concept of world-building, which is typically thought of in the space of speculative and science fiction, but perhaps has a crucial role in the formation of civic and political imagination?

AS: Can civic consciousness and political imagination be formed by people who understand that the reality of cosmopolitanism is based on convivial antagonisms? That sounds idealistic as now these fragile visions of that transnational effort at collective worldbuilding are being violently erased by multiple forces. As a born Londoner my city for example is now gentrified and lifeless with increasing poverty, yet, it has been created out of the labor and capital and culture strung together in the context of and against Empire . Sadly, one is not living in a city anymore that is imbued with the people and the cultural inheritance that was generated there, hence some of us sense we need to create that inheritance. For me, the inheritance is about opening a visual and sonic world that people can enter and build communities, as opposed to nationalisms and states. In this way we are committed to language, because language is so easily captured and manipulated, one must be resistant to the way it is used by institutions to divide and rule..I think there joy in non-conformity.

KE: When we made this work in 2013, there wasn’t so much sustained, serious attention to questions of Pan-Africanism, at least not in the political sense. When you talk about world-building and world-making, our effort was to draw out what we thought of as the epic dimension of that. That’s what led us to this notion of the quiet sun, which we did not know about before embarking on this project. It’s only when we started buying and looking at the stamps that we realized that there was a scientific project to get closer to the surface of the sun, because every eleven years the surface of the sun drops in temperature so you can send satellites.

The work embodies this fascinating moment where the astronomical calendar crosses the political calendar, and you get this amazing intersection of scale between scientific planetary dimensions and the politics of new nations. If you can hold these dimensions of the planetary and the national in play, you start to get at that dimension which is intimate yet simultaneously immense. That’s what we were aiming for.