This book coincides with the completion of the Otolith Group’s Otolith film trilogy, and the exhibition of the three works for the two-venue solo show A Long Time Between Suns, which took place in London at Gasworks (14 February – 5 April) and The Showroom (9 September – 25 October) in 2009.

The book’s production was an integral part of the two halves of the exhibition A Long Time Between Suns, both of which were situated in installations conceived by Will Holder. Following his proposal, during Part I at Gasworks, five conversations were held around the kitchen table of The Otolith Group’s home involving The Otolith Group, Anna Colin, Emily Pethick, Will Holder and Jean Matthee. Visual transcripts of the conversations were compiled and edited by Holder to fill five notice boards in the exhibition, week by week. The book’s production were completed by Holder during the second instalment of the exhibition at The Showroom.

The conversational form as editorial tool has provided a recursive structure that allowed for the continual feedback between the Otolith Trilogy, the archival research for the films, the elements of the exhibition, the programme of events around the exhibition and the form of the book. The dialogues were devised as a method to open up and to mobilise The Otolith Group’s archive in relation to the conversations that regularly take place in their home and the media archives that constitute the political imaginary of decolonisation.

Brought together with the voiceover scripts of the three films, new texts by Diana McCarty, Jean Matthee and TJ Demos, and a number of texts already published on and by The Otolith Group, the book forms an archival assemblage that crosses a broad strata of the Group’s practice, and the way in which it intersects with the practices of interlocutors.

The book is co-published by Sternberg Press, Berlin/New York, The Showroom and Gasworks, London, MACBA, Barcelona, Fondazione Galleria Civica – Centro di Ricerca sulla Contemporaneità di Trento, and If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution.