Rosa Barba
História
Rosa Barba is an artist with a particular interest in film and the ways it articulates space, placing the work and the viewer in a new relationship. Questions of composition, physicality of form and plasticity play an important role in the perception of her work. She interrogates the industry of cinema with respect to various forms of staging, such as gesture, genre, information and documents, taking them out of the context in which they are normally seen and reshaping and representing them anew. Her film works are situated between experimental documentary and fictional narrative, and are indeterminately situated in time. They often focus on natural landscapes and man-made interventions into the environment and probe into the relationship of historical record, personal anecdote, and filmic representation, creating spaces of memory and uncertainty, more legible as reassuring myth than the unstable reality they represent.
She has had solo exhibitions at prestigious institutions worldwide (including Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan; Malmö Konsthall; CAPC Bordeaux; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge MA; MAXXI, Rome; Tate Modern, London) and she has participated in numerous group exhibitions and biennials (including the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil and the 53rd and 56th Venice Biennale). Her work is part of numerous international collections and has been widely published. Barba’s work has been awarded numerous prizes, such as the 46th International Prize for Contemporary Art, Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco (2015).
Editor
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.
Cinematography
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.
Writer
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.
Director
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.
Director
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.
Cinematography
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.
Director
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.
Director
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.
Editor
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)
Cinematography
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)
Writer
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)
Director
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)
Editor
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.
Cinematography
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.
Director of Photography
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.
Director
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.
Writer
Experimental documentary about urbanism.
Director
Experimental documentary about urbanism.
Director
Director
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.
Director
Director
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.
