Projects / The production of daily life

Dispatches from Futureland

Sol Archer/NI Screen

Film screening
Mission to Seafarers, Sailortown, Belfast
11 August 2019

Household would like to invite you to a film screening of Dispatches from Futureland by artist Sol Archer in a pop-up cinema at the Mission to Seafarers in North Belfast’s historical Sailortown neighbourhood.

Dispatches from Futureland, set in the near future, quietly explores the automatisation of the docklands in Rotterdam and the simultaneous growth in global trade and loss of local jobs. Rotterdam has the largest port in Europe, carrying five hundred millions tonnes of cargo annually while employing the labour of only two thousand four hundred workers, a loss of nearly 200,000 jobs in the last 40 years. In the delta of the Maas river, a huge area of new land is under construction to house fully automated terminals, removing human bodies from the corridors of transit. At the heart of the Maasvlakte is Futureland, a tourist visitor centre. This film is a situational study of the inhuman scale and constructed spectacle of international industrial sites, and the theatrical spectacle of an unionised demonstration against it.

Sol Archer is working with Household to make a film in Sailortown as part of the organisation’s long term artist-in-residence programme, Vicinity.

Northern Ireland Screen Digital Film Archive has curated a selection of local archive footage in response to the themes of Dispatches from Futureland.

This is a free event and we will provide refreshments.

Support

This screening is part of the New Lodge Arts Festival and has been made possible with the support of Film Hub NI, Northern Ireland Screen Digital Film Archive and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation.