The ship container is the smallest unit in a global network of exchange that takes place in the 'forgotten space', namely out on the oceans. But even if the actual transaction is invisible to most people, its consequences are so far-reaching, even far inland. In 'The Forgotten Space', Allan Sekula and the film theoretician Noël Burch have created a cinematic essay, which on the one hand makes visible the abstract relations that define economic exchange in a post-industrial age, and on the other hand they address it in an analytic and concrete language - in a different form of 'exchange' with workers, who from their place at the very bottom of the system make sure that the goods nonetheless reach their destination. From Holland and Belgium to Los Angeles, China and Bilbao, the shipping industry resembles a self-sustaining, trans-national system controlled from land and with fewer and fewer employees on the giant crossings. Sekula & Burch illustrate their argument with archive materials, interviews and old film clips, and the result is a piece of solid, rhetorical documentarism in the discursive tradition.

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