The Forgotten Space – Discussion with Sukhdev Sandhu & Phil Steinberg

Phil Steinberg (blog) and Sukhdev Sandhu recently discussed Allan Sekula’s and Noël Burch’s film The Forgotten Space at Nottingham Contemporary.

Phil has also written a review on The Forgotten Space and an obituary for Allan Sekula, who recently died.

Forgotten Spaces: Harvey, Buchloh and Sekula

Finally, I was able to get a copy of The Forgotten Space, a documentary film on containerization, directed by Allan Sekula and Noël Burch. Although I am really looking forward to seeing it, I didn’t make it, yet. Anyhow – here’s a good piece to get into the right mood. David Harvey and Benjamin Buchloh comment on the film and discuss with one of the directors, Allan Sekula. Especially the first couple of minutes are really interesting. Harvey speaks of containerization as “one of the great innovations without which we would not have had globalization, the deindustrialization of America and all the other things that have been going on.” Considering technology, Harvey digs out a passage from Marx’s Capital on the relation of man to nature and discusses it in regard to The Forgotten Space:

“Technology reveals the active relation of man to nature, the direct process of the production of his life, and thereby it also lays bare the process of the production of the social relations of his life, and of the mental conceptions that flow from those relations” *