“2012 is the year of Etel Adnan”
But what of 2011? Or 2021, the year of Etel Adnan’s death.
What is a year anyway? Adnan died a few days ago, on Sunday November 14th, so what do the years even mean within the posthumous dates of a person (1925-2021), if over a month is left unaccounted for?
We know that ‘Days are where we live/Where can we live but days?’, but the year is so vast, a minor sea of time, that how can we account for its expanse, one the one hand, and their minimizing in significance, as they both accumulate and recede?
When does a year begin? When can a year end?
These pandemic years, for example, do they have beginnings or ends?
(Daniel Defoe was only 5 years old in 1665, but he wrote Journal of a Plague Year, published in 1722)
Etel Adnan has died this year and 2012, according to Hans Ulrich Obrist, was, at the time, the year of Etel Adnan (in no small part to her pivotal role in that Summer’s dOCUMENTA(13) exhibition.
This year – and the pandemic – continues on. And yet, here we all are in 2021.
Back in 2011, The Otolith Group sensed that 2012 was going to be the year of Etel Adnan. That is why they made the film I See Infinite Distance Between Any Point and Another (2012) of her reading from her 2011 book Sea and Fog (Nightboat Books)
In searching for a book on his shelves to commemorate the memory of Etel Adnan’s passing, our librarian Lucius Fletcher, could only muster the book by The Otolith Group called THOUGHTFORM/LA FORMA DEL PENSIERO (Mousse Publishing: Milan, 2011), focused on their earlier films (including their Otolith trilogy) released to accompany an exhibition at MAXXI Rome, the year Etel Adnan published her poetry book and the year before The Otolith Group released their film about her poetry.
Their then most recent film Hydra Decapta (2010) was included in the exhibition and was part two of The Otolith Group’s trilogy of works on hydropolitics and hydroaesthetics, for which their film on Etel Adnan was the second and The Radiant (2012), would become the third.
The book, therefore, arrives on time and also too late, as 2011 crashes onto the shore of 2012. Or, as Etel Adnan writes in Sea and Fog:
Thus waves come in pairs.
And what about years?
