From Source to Poem

Charge is ultimately an investigation of light as a source to transform the future.

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.

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.

The film Bending to Earth is a further investigation into inscriptions and transformations of society manifested in the landscape. Several radioactive fields are circled by a hand camera in a helicopter, while a recorded voice-over which appears through several—often distorted—world radio stations describes the materials of those constructions and opens up a mediation of order systems and landscape archives. The fields represent a sort of alphabet of an image engineered in the earth; the camera is an observer of this document and its relation to reality, not just as a pre-existent form but as a potential or imagined object—the part that remains behind the scene, the break within the narrative.

A movie about things.

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)

The 16mm film is connected to Barba’s ongoing White Museum series, in which projections of clear film are used to alter awareness of the landscape and built environment. This instance took place at the Hirsch Observatory at Rensselear Polytechnic Institute in upstate New York, in 2015. Set to electronic music, the film follows the smooth, graceful movements of the observatory’s telescope. The projection highlights the observatory’s machinery and architecture, eventually casting its beam of light through the open ceiling. A poetic reflection on space and time, Above the Plate and Receiver points towards the autonomy of technology (its ability to operate and learn independently), and the limits of human knowledge.

A fictitious narrative about a society on an unstable piece of land that is in danger of disappearing. The situation requires the population’s collective initiative in order to secure their survival both as a society and as individuals.

The new 16mm film Radiant Exposures—Facts Run on Light Beams These Days (the latter part of the title quotes from Donna Haraway) returns to Rosa Barba’s long-standing motif of the desert and its exploration of modern archives as a manifestation of human’s desire for progress. As in previous films, Radiant Exposures—Facts Run on Light Beams These Days appears to portray a site out of time and space—ethereal, timeless and unearthly. The predominant motif of the film is the human-made landscape with large expanses of rectangular panels reflecting the sun light. These reflective panels are in fact concentrating sunlight, creating and collecting energy. The presence of the sun is made palpable by the shimmering light and the and the blurring of the imagery.

Experimental documentary about urbanism.