The Otolith Group's Mascon
Thursday, March 13, 2025 at 7pm
361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn
Mascon: A Massive Concentration of Black Experiential Energy, The Otolith Group, 2024, digital projection, 36 mins
Light Industry presents the first New York screening of Mascon: A Massive Concentration of Black Experiential Energy, a new work by the Otolith Group (Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun).
Made to accompany a mural created by the Otolith Group for the Art Institute of Chicago, Mascon takes its title from literary scholar Stephen Henderson’s concept of “mascon” or “a massive concentration of Black experiential energy,” a neologism originally coined to theorize Black poetics. The Otolith Group here expand this notion to cinema, surveying the filmographies of West African auteurs Ousmane Sembène and Djibril Diop Mambéty through a series of cunning superimpositions and juxtapositions, what they have termed an “audiovisual mosaic.” Within this unceasing flow, complex yet wordless arguments emerge—about the two filmmakers’ work, about the aesthetic dimensions of Pan-Africanist thought.
“In our video Mascon,” Eshun explained, “we are studying not so much the narratives, but creating a series of scenes that study certain recurring gestures and landscapes, bodies and spaces that you see across both of their works. We’re creating something like a borderless world in which characters from different films meet in the plane of the image. We’re creating a series of impossible meetings and impossible dialogues across films separated in time and space, which meet and create all kinds of hybrid combinations and impossible duets. Mascon is us trying to envision what a borderless cinema looks like by drawing on the work of these two great filmmakers.”
Followed by a conversation with Sagar and Eshun.
Tickets - Pay what you can ($10 suggested donation), available at door.
Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office opens at 6:30pm. No entry 10 minutes after start of show.