XXIII Jornadas de Estudio de la Imagen - KODWO ESHUN

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Self-transcribed from the recording's audio/video with Whisper ASR, then drawn from the frozen curation of the CCRU oral archive. The identifiers below fingerprint the exact source transcript files.

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Adjudicated APPROVED 2026-07-11 (basis: owner ruling 2026-07-11: institutional recordings released except fee-charging course content; lane recent-institutional -> recent-institutional-released). Series: standalone. Source: audio original (.mp3).

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These jump targets come from timestamps preserved in the source transcript, so they work as navigational anchors rather than editorially invented section labels. Timings are approximate — they mark where a passage begins, not exact word timing.

• 00:00:00

  We continue the sessions this morning dedicated to the three artists who have proposed a workshop for the days and now I will introduce you to Kodjo Essun. Kodjo Essun is an artist and theorist who lives in London and as many of you know is co-founder of the Otolith Group collective. The Otolith Group has exhibited…

• 00:10:18

  It was his second and final film. He died in 1998. So revisiting Hyenas, which is what I will do today, and in fact revisiting its final scene, means to return to Hyenas, which we can understand as a cinema of demoralization. So in 1992, Hyenas was both celebrated and criticized for its aesthetic disenchantment…

• 00:25:42

  is channeled towards the future of world capitalism that is personified in the malevolent sovereignty of Linger Ramatu and the universality of this narrative according to the critic Kobnemursa resides not in the translation into an African context of a European story that is originally set in a Swiss village…

• 00:55:03

  Which is to say, Drumman Dromere is Schrödinger's cat. And as Schrödinger's cat, he is neither dead nor alive. And it is this uncertainty that diagonalizes, the binary dilemma imposed by Lingay-Ramitou. That is to say, it is this uncertainty that draws a diagonal between the dilemma of accepting or refusing the offer…

• 01:05:03

  The computational powers of pattern and correlation surely dwarf the computational limitations of the economic forecast. But Elena Esposito adds one more critical factor. The present future of algorithmic prediction can be described as blind because the present future cannot include itself. Algorithms cannot predict…

• 01:14:12

  So the, the question of disappearance is a question of belief, right? It's a question of not being able to believe your own eyes. This is the question of magic. Magic is the, is the disarticulation of the image from belief. The, the, the kinds of, um, the tricks of causation that magic plays on you. So, you know…

• 01:29:07

  futuristic films. So when Hyenas appeared it was understood not as a film of continental futurism, nor even as a film of Afrofuturism, but as a film of Afro-pessimism. So there's another version of this talk in which I describe three different discourses of Afro-pessimism that are operational. The first discourse…

• 01:39:05

  and speaks for a desire to move to move through uh to move in and through and by way of occlusion and uh and away from a kind of enforced visibility and enforced participation and enforced sense of belonging and it speaks to a desire for disidentification identification.