

The Relational Sea
Fish Story, Allan Sekula’s image- and text-based research project, juxtaposes explorations of our globalized infrastructure with the romantic allegories of our maritime expanse. Using the seemingly everyday images of the dock, its workers, and all the many pieces situated amid land and sea, Sekula’s multi-chapter photography draws attention to an immeasurable, unbounded effect generated by a constructed world. Shifting from a wider focus to the relationships in-between and adjacent to geopolitical and economic forms, we now look closer at the act of world-building as a method of interconnecting to the spaces around us.
The films in this program touch on who and what becomes a subject within the perspectives of these fabricated frameworks and narratives. Narrowing in on transatlantic forced migration, the act of association, and the extraction and use of resources and labor, The Relational Sea expands upon Sekula’s dialogue on nautical aura. They are paired with two of his feature-length works, Lottery of the Sea and The Forgotten Space, the latter of which Sekula made in collaboration with filmmaker and writer Noël Burch.
Presented as an accompaniment to the Walker’s exhibition of Allan Sekula: Fish Story, The Relational Sea is free to view both online below September 5 to 26, 2023, and in the Bentson Mediatheque, the Walker’s self-select cinema, open during gallery hours from September 5, 2023, to January 21, 2024.
Full program:
Lottery of the Sea by Allan Sekula*
The Forgotten Space by Noël Burch and Allan Sekula
South Circular by Mónica de Miranda
Between Relating and Use by Nazlı Dinçel
Inextinguishable Fire by Harun Farocki
*Note: Lottery of the Sea is only available to view on-site at the Walker’s Bentson Mediatheque.

Lottery of the Sea by Allan Sekula
Human life exists primarily on land, but what does it mean to also consider the sea? Taking its title from the work of political economist Adam Smith, Sekula’s rarely exhibited three-hour diaristic rumination invites us to consider the risk of the seafarer’s gamble when endeavoring to transport commodities on an unpredictable seascape, drawing attention to the associations between labor and material goods. Lottery of the Sea features narrated vignettes of global maritime exchange—from the Netherlands, Greece, Japan, the United States, and more—demonstrating that the sea is a zenith of necessity and natural fascination, yet its horizons know no bounds. 2006, US, digital, 179 min.

The Forgotten Space by Noël Burch and Allan Sekula
“The sea is forgotten until disaster strikes,” states Sekula in the opening narration of his 2010 sequel to Fish Story made in collaboration with Noël Burch. Notably, disaster is always seconds away with the precarity of maritime trade and the individuals—from the factories, union trade offices, and politicians—involved in keeping its operations afloat. Unearthing stories within the hidden abyss of the maritime economy, Burch and Sekula’s work follows the cargo ship from countryside to urban space and traces its varying stakeholders within the formation of globalization. 2010, Netherlands/Austria, digital, English, Dutch, Spanish, Korean, Bahasa Indonesia, and Chinese with English subtitles, 112 min.

South Circular by Mónica de Miranda
The former Military Road outside of Lisbon, Portugal, exists both as a figurative border surrounding the developed city and as a material site for capturing the memories of “fragile and lost places in the peripheries” of the municipality. Within what remains of the decommissioned road, self-built houses and infrastructure now extends from Caxias to Loures and the opposite side of the Tagus River in Almada and Monte Caparica, housing those secluded from the contemporary metropolis. Fiction and reality intermesh to highlight a diaspora narrating their own existences between limbo and celestial spaces. 2019, Portugal, digital, Portuguese with English subtitles, 22 min.

Between Relating and Use by Nazlı Dinçel
Using terms from visual theorist Laura Marks’s “Transnational Object” and psychologist D. W. Winnicott’s “Transitional Object,” Between Relating and Use is “an attempt to ethically make work in a foreign land.” Dinçel moves away from the position of the ethnographer and turns inward toward “how we use our lovers,” utilizing text and spoken language to discuss meaning behind exchange. 2018, Argentina/US, 16mm transferred to digital, 9 min.
Content Note: This film contains sexual content and brief nudity.

Inextinguishable Fire by Harun Farocki
Farocki’s candid yet astute insight into chemical conglomerate Dow Chemical illustrates the human cost of exploiting resources for the eradication of life. Set to the sceneries of dreary laboratories offices juxtaposed with the broadcasted images of war in Vietnam, Inextinguishable Fire thus develops its main point: the construction-set–like backdrop crafted by the corporate world creates divisions that distract us from the manufacturing of mass destruction by our peers. Refraining from an emotional appeal, Farocki draws attention to the matter with the onerous nature of chemical-based annihilation, stating: “When napalm is burning, it is too late to extinguish it.” 1969, Germany, digital, German with English subtitles, 25 min., Ruben/Bentson Moving Image Collection
Bios
Noël Burch (b. San Francisco, 1932) has been living in France since 1951. He graduated from the Institut Des Hautes Etudes Cinèmatographiques in 1954. While primarily known for his theoretical writings, he has always positioned himself as a filmmaker and has directed over 20 titles, mostly documentaries. Burch has been publishing since the 1960s. Among his numerous publications are his first and best-known book Theory of Film Practice (New York: Praeger, 1973) and To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in Japanese Cinema (Berkeley, 1979). From 1967 to 1972, he collaborated with Janine Bazin and Andrè S. Labarthe for the celebrated series, Cinèastes de Notre Temps, and directed seven programs, which are considered to have renewed the “film-maker portrait” in the heroic years of French public television. It was during that same period that Burch was co-founder and director of the Institut de Formation Cinèmatographique, an alternative film school associating theory and practice.
Mónica de Miranda is a Portuguese/Angolan visual artist, filmmaker, and researcher whose interdisciplinary and research-based practice critically looks at the convergence of politics, gender, memory, space, and history. Her work encompasses drawing, installation, photography, film, and sound on the boundaries between documentary and fiction. De Miranda investigates strategies of resistance, geographies of affection, storytelling, and ecologies of care. She is the founder of Hangar (2014), an art and research center in Lisbon, and her work has been presented at major international events such as the 6th Lubumbashi Biennale; 12th Berlin Biennale; 12th Dakar Biennale; 5th Biennale Internationale de l’Art Contemporain de Casablanca; Bamako Encounters – 13th African Biennale of Photography; 14th Venice Architecture Biennale; BIENALSUR 2021; Houston FotoFest 2022; 18th Fotografia Europea, Reggio Emilia. Solo and group exhibitions have taken place at CAIXA Cultural, Rio de Janeiro; Bildmuseet, Umeå; Kadist Art Foundation, Paris; Gulbenkian, Lisbon; MUCEM, Marseilles; AfricaMuseum, Tervuren; MAAT, Lisbon; MUAC, Mexico City; Barbican, London; Autograph, London; Frac pays de la Loire, Nantes; Uppsala Museum, Sweden; MNAC, Lisbon; Camões Cultural Institute, Luanda, among others. Her work is featured in public and private collections worldwide.
Nazlı Dinçel’s handmade work reflects on experiences of disruption. They record the body in context with arousal, immigration, dislocation, and desire with the film object: its texture, color, and the tractable emulsion of the 16mm material. Their use of text as image, language, and sound imitates the failure of memory and their own displacement within a western society. Born in Ankara, Turkey, Dinçel immigrated to the United States at age 17 and currently resides in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. They obtained their MFA in filmmaking from UW-Milwaukee. Their works have been exhibited globally including at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Vienna Modern Art Museum, Buenos Aires International Film Festival, Walker Art Center, and Hong Kong International Film Festival. They were most recently a 2019/2020 Radcliffe Institute Fellow for Advanced study at Harvard University, and a 2019 Emerging Artist recipient of the Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowship. In addition to exhibiting with institutions, Dinçel avidly self-distributes and tours with their work in micro-cinemas, artist-run laboratories, and alternative screening spaces to support and circulate handmade filmmaking to communities outside of institutions. Their 2018 film Instructions on How to Make a Film was recently acquired into the Ruben/Bentson Moving Image Collection and is on view in the Walker’s Bentson Mediatheque. Dinçel transitioned to they/them in 2022. All genders in previous works and writings should be understood accordingly.
Harun Farocki (1944–2014) was born in Germany-annexed Czechoslovakia. From 1966 to 1968 he attended the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin (DFFB). In addition to teaching posts in Berlin, Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Manila, Munich, and Stuttgart, he was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Farocki made close to 120 films, including feature films, essay films, and documentaries. He worked in collaboration with other filmmakers as a scriptwriter, actor, and producer. In 1976 he staged Heiner Müller’s plays The Battle and Tractor together with Hanns Zischler in Basel, Switzerland. He wrote for numerous publications, and from 1974 to 1984 he was editor and author of the magazine Filmkritik (München). His work has been shown in many national and international exhibitions and installations in galleries and museums.
Since the early 1970s, Allan Sekula’s (1951–2013) works with photographic sequences, written texts, slide shows, and sound recordings have traveled a path close to cinema, sometimes referring to specific films. However, apart from a few video works from the early 1970s and early ’80s, he stayed away from the moving image. This changed in 2001, with the first work that Sekula was willing to call a film, Tsukiji, a “city symphony” set in Tokyo’s giant fish market. Sekula’s books include Photography Against the Grain (1984), Fish Story (1995), Dismal Science (1999), Performance Under Working Conditions (2003), Titanic’s Wake (2003), and Polonia and Other Fables (2009). These works range from the theory and history of photography to studies of family life in the grip of the military industrial complex, and in Fish Story, to explorations of the world maritime economy. His film The Forgotten Space, made in collaboration with Noël Burch, is a filmic sequel to Fish Story.
Major support to preserve, digitize, and present the Ruben/Bentson Moving Image Collection is generously provided by the Bentson Foundation.