People To Be Resembling

The Otolith Group is a London-based, artist-led collective founded by Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar in 2002. Their film People to be Resembling revisits the landmark recording of the first album by Codona, a free jazz and fusion group comprising musicians Don Cherry, Colin Walcott, and Nana Vasconcelos and active 1979–83. For The Otolith Group, Codona’s music embodies a progressive, pan-cultural sensibility that resonates with their own ideological affiliations.

People to be Resembling is largely composed of unpublished black and white photographs and negatives taken from the personal archives of photographers Roberto Masotti and Isio Saba. The photographs of Cherry, Walcott, and Vasconcelos recording in Ludwigsburg, in and outside the Tonstudio Bauer, are the only pictorial evidence of Codona’s collective music making. By activating these casual pictures through cropping and panning to focus on bystanders' perplexed and bemused reactions, The Otolith Group suggests that there is more to be gleaned from these images than their testimonial power. They also make their own authorial presence felt by a pair of gloved hands that carefully lay out strips of photo negatives on a light table in Masotti’s Milan studio.

Rather than score a loose association of images to Codona’s music, The Otolith Group instead include original music performed by Charles Hayward of This Heat. Additionally, the video introduces passages of folk dances from various cultures culled from ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax’s collection of film clips Palm Play (1977) and Dance and Human History (1974). Lomax’s interest in documenting forms of global dance evolved almost concurrently with Codona’s intercultural aesthetic. Combining sequences from Lomax’s visual ethnography of rotating, whirling, and spinning East Asian and North African dancers with a carefully crafted arrangement of Codona imagery, People to be Resembling generates an audiovisual constellation of associations and relations between images, captions, voices, and music.