Art Papers Screens: The Forgotten Space-a Film By Noel Burch + Allan Sekula

Online, November 30, 2011 (Newswire.com) - Join us for the Atlanta premiere of "The Forgotten Space," the award-winning film essay seeking to understand the contemporary maritime world in relation to the symbolic legacy of the sea.

Allan Sekula is a photographer, writer-critic, and filmmaker based in Los Angeles. His work on the global maritime economy was included in Documenta 11, 2002, and Documenta 12, 2007.

Since the early 1970s, his works with photographic sequences, written texts, slide shows, and sound recordings have traveled a path close to cinema. At times, they refer to specific films. In other instances, such as his 1973 work Aerospace Folktales, they operate like a "disassembled movie" while resisting the "dictatorship of the projector." Yet, with the exception of a few video works from the early 70s and early 80s, he has stayed away from the moving image. This changed in 2001 with Tsukiji, the first work that Sekula has been willing to call a film.

"The Forgotten Space" 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 "Fish Story," seeking to understand and describe the contemporary maritime world in relation to the complex symbolic legacy of the sea.

"The Forgotten Space" has been screened in over 30 festivals worldwide since its premiere at the Venice Film Festival in 2010, where it won a special jury prize.

A short Q & A with Allan Sekula follow the screening.

Tuesday, December 6, 2011, 7pm
W Atlanta-Downtown, 45 Ivan Allen Boulevard, Atlanta

This events is free, open to the public and wheelchair accessible.

The screening of "The Forgotten Space" is sponsored by W Atlanta-Downtown, the official hotel sponsor of ART PAPERS.

For more info, including Allan Sekula's complete three-day public program in ATLANTA and interviews, video, directions + maps, visit: artpapers.org