PARASOPHIA 京都国際現代芸術祭2015

Parasophia will be presenting a series of film screenings at the Film Theatre of the Museum of Kyoto as the Cinema Program portion of Parasophia: Kyoto International Festival of Contemporary Culture 2015. Scheduled for May 7 is a screening of The Forgotten Space (2010), a film essay by Parasophia’s participating artist Allan Sekula and filmmaker and author Noël Burch.

The Forgotten Space
Directed by Allan Sekula & Noël Burch, 2010, 112 min.; digital screening

To rule the sea is to ruin the world

The sea is forgotten until disaster strikes. But perhaps the biggest seagoing disaster is the global supply chain, which—maybe in a more fundamental way than financial speculation—leads the world economy to the abyss.
The film follows container cargo aboard ships, barges, trains and trucks, listening to workers, engineers, planners, politicians, and those marginalized by the global transport system. We visit displaced farmers and villagers in Holland and Belgium, underpaid truck drivers in Los Angeles, seafarers aboard mega-ships shuttling between Asia and Europe, and factory workers in China, whose low wages are the fragile key to the whole puzzle. And in Bilbao, we discover the most sophisticated expression of the belief that the maritime economy, and the sea itself, is somehow obsolete.
A range of materials is used: descriptive documentary, interviews, archive stills and footage, clips from old movies. The result is an essayistic, visual documentary about one of the most important processes that affects us today.
The Forgotten Space is based on Sekula's massive long-term project Fish Story, seeking to understand and describe the contemporary maritime world in relation to the complex symbolic legacy of the sea.

(Official synopsis)



Allan Sekula
b. 1951 in Erie, PA, USA; d. 2013 in Los Angeles, CA, USA. Parasophia: Kyoto International Festival of Contemporary Culture 2015 participating artist. Read more: Allan Sekula