The Absent Sea is a seven-minute essay video shot with a Red Epic camera and was made in homage to the late Allan Sekula and Noel Burch’s recent documentary The Forgotten Space (2013).

Which is a critique of global capitalism, international container shipping, modernity and the sea as ‘the forgotten space’. My video is a personal reflective performance video that addresses these issues in terms of my own ancestral roots as a post-colonial Australian subject that can be traced back to the Greek island of Kythera in the context of the Mediterrean Sea, hybridity, modernity, memory, space and time. The video features a voiceover that delineates these issues from a subjective point-of-view and in the light of the complex criss-crossing histories, contexts, cross-cultural shipping and trading that has marked the Mediterrean Sea since its first historical accounts of representation.

Credits:

• Written and directed: John Conomos
• Cinematography and editing: Josh Raymond
• Camera assistant: Joshua Heath
• Grips: Robin Hearfield
• Runner: Mitchell Sloan
• Location: Petersham Park, Sydney.