Rosa Barba

Subconscious Society

Rosa Barba

Subconscious Society is about the end of the industrial era and the transition to the digital age, in which computer code and the clone or copy are in the process of replacing material objects and analogue technology. In the film, this paradigm shift is represented in the form of a social community, whose protagonists make a final attempt at assigning and archiving objects from the past.

Bending to Earth

Rosa Barba

Empirical Effect

Rosa Barba

The topographical starting point of the film "The Empirical Effect" is the area around Mount Vesuvius in Southern Italy. The protagonists of the film, which was shot in the summer of 2009, are all survivors of the last active eruption of the volcano in 1944, and live in the so-called “Red Zone” in the immediate danger zone of the volcano. The recordings were made in a disused observatory near to the crater, and also include the staging of a trial evacuation. Fact and fiction in "The Empirical Effect" are blurring, with the volcano Vesuvius as a protagonist and metaphor for the complex relationships between society and politics in Italy: unpredictable, powerful, destructive, and based in the middle of a densely populated area alongside the Mediterranean coast. No one is able to control this immense force of nature and yet it connects the inhabitants and their environments with an invisible tie.

Voice Engine

Rosa Barba

In Voice Engine, 2021, Rosa Barba further explores ideas that undergo perpetual transformation of images and their translation through sound. The work destabilizes the old hierarchy of cinema components, freeing them up from their original use and letting them interact in new and unforeseen ways. Voice Engine resonates with Barba’s sculptural approach to film and the relation between the work and the viewer. At Kunsthal, the voices of choristers from Rotterdam power a set of projectors. Their song is a new, unique composition closely aligned to the film material. The choristers activate the 16mm and 35mm projectors with the various frequencies of their voices. Here, light and sound can respond unexpectedly to one another using the analogue footage and the timbre and power of analogue voices.

Somnium

Rosa Barba

Inside the Outset: Evoking a Space of Passage

Rosa Barba

It is an investigation into the loaded, transforming topography that is already palpable in the landscape, before we actually understand what language it creates for our society.

Solar Flux Recordings

Rosa Barba

Beyond the cinematographic flow of succeeding and overlaying images each group refers to a specific position of the sun which is reached only once during the exhibition period: represented by the specific orientation of the inclined glass panels and designated by a metal plaque on the floor, the sculptures become recordings of this performative event. A system and its diagram at the same time, Solar Flux Recordings, returns us to the world we inhabit and underlines the bonds which link us to the environment and its technologies.

Enigmatic Whisper

Rosa Barba

Shot in 16mm inside the studio of artist Alexander Calder (1898–1976) in Roxbury, Connecticut, the film draws a filmic portrait of one of the protagonists of twentieth-century art: through images of tools and work materials, still conserved as Calder left them, as well as the natural external context. (Rosa Barba)

Aggregate States of Matters

Rosa Barba

Aggregate States of Matters highlights the ambiguous relationship between humans and nature. For her new 35mm film shot in Peru, Rosa Barba worked with communities that are affected by the melting of a glacier and geological time becoming exposed. Barba shows the slow disappearance of the glacier and the perception of this fact within the Quechuan population in the Andes. While exploring different local myths, she outlines the possibility of translating ancient knowledge into the present time.

Disseminate and Hold

Rosa Barba

Experimental documentary about urbanism.

From Source to Poem

Rosa Barba

Rosa Barba's 35mm epic From Source to Poem is an audio-visual investigation into the nature of cultural heritage, shot in the Library of Congress' space-like preservation campus in Culpepper, Virginia, where advanced technology co-mingles with nitrate film and magnetic tape.