Ryan Family Film Series: Space Is the Place

Space is the Place is a posthumanist future-myth in which jazz composer Sun Ra faces off against nemesis The Overseer in a galactic tarot card game for the fate of Earth’s Black people. Cutting through time and space to 1970s Oakland during the apex of the Black Power movement, it is a continuous push and pull toward and away from tropes of progressivism, historical reference, rational time, and political critique, a visualization of an “alter-destiny” of creative freedom and unity on a planet built by oppression and fragmentation, the same planet (Earth) which Sun Ra himself purported to have left completely by the time he was 23.

Followed by a conversation and Q&A with Professors Brynn Hatton (Art), Brian Stark (Music), Noah Shenker (Film and Media Studies), and select members of the Sun Ra Arkestra

Co-Sponsored with Art, Music, and Theater