Veronica Santi: "Rosa Barba Vistamarestudio", Artforum, December 2018
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Veronica Santi: “Rosa Barba Vistamarestudio”, Artforum, December 2018
Erika Balsom, “Historical Projections”, Artforum, September 2017
268 ARTFORUM
Rosa Barba, Boundaries of
Consumption, 2012, 16-mm
film, modified projector, film
canisters, metal spheres.
Installation view, Kunsthaus
Zürich. Photo: Jenny Ekholm.
HISTORICAL
PROJECTIONS
ERIKA BALSOM ON THE ART OF ROSA BARBA
LAST YEAR, sales of vinyl records reached a twenty- Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder, Ben Rivers, and,
five-year high—up 53 percent from 2015—and sales most famously, Tacita Dean have developed practices
of e-books fell for the second year running, with their that depend and reflect on the physical specificity of the
print counterparts gaining in popularity. Startling as medium at the very moment of its technological eclipse.
these developments may seem, neither should come These otherwise diverse practices are united by their
as a surprise to those who have watched obsolete efforts to reimagine film as artisanal, emphasizing craft
technologies make their way into the gallery in recent and rejecting divisions of labor. Buckingham looks
years. In the midst of the second machine age—an era back at the earliest years of cinema, prior to its indus-
of relentless digitization and automation—we have trialization, and to the first moments of amateur
become obsessed with reasserting the value of tactile moviemaking; Gibson and Recoder’s projection
encounters that stand obstinately outside networks of works transform film into a performing art animated
electronic circulation. We search for auratic, “authen- by human presence; Rivers hand-processes film stock
tic” experiences marked by historicity and provenance, in his kitchen and imagines ways of living off the grid;
able to supply an organic warmth missing from the and Dean gravitates to fragile subjects linked to fini-
cold inhumanity of the digital and inject a charge of tude and ephemerality, characteristics she also imparts
contingency into the monotonous regularity of ones to the medium itself.
and zeroes. The Sicily-born, Berlin-based artist Rosa Barba is
Take the proliferation of photochemical film in often mentioned in the same breath as these figures;
contemporary art, the most significant aspect of a like them, she is known for an engagement with filmic
more widespread engagement with superannuated materiality in which obsolescence is never far out of
technologies. Artists such as Matthew Buckingham, the frame. And yet the artisanal is conspicuously
SEPTEMBER 2017 269
Left: Rosa Barba, Coupez ici (Cut
Here), 2012, 35-mm film, light box,
motor, 28 1⁄2 × 32 1⁄4 × 5 1⁄8".
Opposite page: Two views of “Rosa
Barba: From Source to Poem to
Rhythm to Reader,” 2017, Pirelli
HangarBicocca, Milan. Top, from
left: From Source to Poem, 2016;
Here, There, Where the Echoes Are,
2016. Bottom: Here, There, Where
the Echoes Are, 2016. Photos:
Agostino Osio.
In Barba’s work, obsolescence is never far out of the frame.
absent from her practice. Although Barba activates “From Source to Poem to Rhythm to Reader,” on a typewriter to deboss letters directly onto celluloid
our current nostalgia for old media, she seems acutely view through October and comprising fourteen works (Spacelength Thought, 2012), and creates rhythmic
aware of the irony inherent within it. Vinyl, printed made between 2009 and 2017, this immense dark- multiprojection installations of flashing light and
books, and film began life as products of industry, ened space hosts a clattering parliament of film pro- color (Hear, There, Where the Echoes Are, 2016).
after all—soulless technological copies, perched on jectors. Some are put to idiosyncratic, reflexive use, as Even projectors used to display films in a relatively
the bleeding edge of innovation. It is only now, when in Boundaries of Consumption, 2012, a work consist- conventional manner retain a strong physical empha-
the digital has become allied with speed, circulation, ing of a 16-mm projector on the floor, playing a loop sis. Rather than being hidden away in a booth, they
and reproduction, that artifacts of the mechanical era of leader that runs through a stack of film canisters are on view as grand, imposing objects that rival the
are left to bask in the glow of that quality they once and around a reel mounted on the wall. As the film image in the fascination they inspire. Immense
menaced: authenticity. The recasting of film as arti- strip moves under the topmost canister, the drum con- 35-mm projectors fitted with loopers stand promi-
sanal thus risks eliding its historical position within a tinuously tips back and forth, resulting in the aleatory nently, supporting platters on which the entirety of a
broad spectrum of modern industrial production movement of two metal balls that sit on its surface— film lies tightly spooled, awaiting its passage through
where it constituted but one of a myriad of technolo- the work deploys the physical movement of film itself the gate.
gies for the transformation of the natural world. Barba to produce a visible contingency that would have no While Barba’s expanded-cinema progenitors fore-
turns to the medium precisely as part of a larger exca- place in the automated Digital Cinema Packages that grounded the apparatus as part of a critique of illu-
vation of twentieth-century encounters between have taken over commercial film exhibition. sionism, which they aligned with both a political
nature and technology—an undertaking she also pur- Such works position Barba as a contemporary heir imperative to nullify the ideological power of narra-
sues at the level of content, through images of blighted to the expanded-cinema practices of the 1970s, which tive cinema and a modernist drive to lay bare the
land and toxic waste. In the many works she has pro- similarly sought to examine the sculptural materiality material support of their medium, she is invested nei-
duced over the past decade, film is nothing quaint or of the filmic machine. Rejecting the spectator’s ther in dismantling dominant cinema nor in purging
fragile. It is a sturdy survivor of one machine age that absorption in the immaterial spectacle of a fictional illusionism. Many of her films, such as Enigmatic
we encounter from deep within another. world on-screen, figures such as Anthony McCall and Whisper (2017), a 16-mm portrait of the Connecticut
Guy Sherwin turned to an interrogation of the actual- studio that once belonged to Alexander Calder, oper-
ONCE USED to build locomotives and airplanes, the ity of the projected image in space. Like them, Barba ate within a quasi-documentary idiom reliant on the
vast halls of Milan’s Pirelli HangarBicocca recall the anatomizes the apparatus, reconstituting it in an array naturalistic presentation of representational images.
activity of urban factory production, long since of sculptural forms: She places motorized film loops And as much as Barba manifests a clear investment in
departed. On the occasion of Barba’s exhibition in light boxes (Coupez ici [Cut Here], 2012), modifies filmic materiality, she never relinquishes a notion of
270 ARTFORUM
offer a compendium of man-made scars on the earth’s
surface. They undertake a filmic writing of what
Adorno calls natural history—a concept that posits
nature and history not as antithetical, but as deeply
and dialectically intertwined fragments within the
“charnel house” of modernity, itself an epoch marked
by a paradoxical marriage of productivity and col-
lapse. In extreme long shots, Barba presents military
installations, fields of solar panels, and reservoirs for
contaminated soil: so much material evidence of tech-
nological intervention in the name of progress, rooted
in the same historical formation that gave birth to
the cinema.
Somnium examines Maasvlakte 2, a land-reclama-
tion project in the Netherlands, while Subconscious
Society spans several dilapidated sites in England,
including a ruined roller coaster and the Maunsell
Forts, built during World War II in the Thames and
Mersey estuaries. Bending to Earth, which debuted as
part of the 2015 Venice Biennale, turns to the alluring
geometry of buried capsules of radioactive waste,
monuments that commemorate a poisoning destined
to outlive us all. Here, the forward march of progress
is shown to be inextricable from a spectacle of envi-
ronmental destruction. These are films that ask what
will be kept and what will be lost as the catastrophe
of modernity pushes ever onward.
Above: Rosa Barba, Enigmatic Opposite page, top: Rosa Barba, Opposite page, center: Rosa Barba, Opposite page, bottom: Rosa Barba, If Barba has a cinematographic signature here, it is
Whisper, 2017, 16 mm, color, Somnium, 2011, 16 mm transferred Subconscious Society, a Feature, Bending to Earth, 2015, 35 mm,
sound, 7 minutes 59 seconds. to digital video, color, sound, 2014, 35 mm, color, sound, color, sound, 15 minutes. her insistent marshalling of aerial perspective. To call
19 minutes 20 seconds. 40 minutes. this a bird’s-eye view would be to too quickly align it
with a naturalism, and in so doing disavow its pro-
found ties to combat and conquest. As Paul Virilio has
noted, at the turn of the twentieth century film and
aviation joined together in what he calls “dromos-
the medium as archive. If conventional cinema aims for age—a time when factories, trains, pocket watches, copy,” a technologized form of vision distinctly
absorption and expanded cinema aims for estrange- and amusement parks forever transformed work, aligned with both speed and destruction. Barba’s fre-
ment, Barba rejects both, staging a confrontation leisure, and the environment; a time when an intensity quent use of helicopter shots offers a panoramic per-
between these two ways of approaching the film expe- of historical consciousness emerged precisely as the spective on the industrial structures she documents,
rience: She couples a phenomenological encounter solidity of tradition began to crumble. flattening three-dimensional space and effecting a
with the apparatus and a commitment to film as a These concerns are foregrounded in the consis- defamiliarization that drains detail from the picture.
technology of the virtual, one able to serve as a portal tent iconography that emerges across Barba’s practice. These macroscopic views present the earth not as
to other places and other times. The subject of Enigmatic Whisper is in fact a slightly habitat, but as picture or object. In our present moment
Why, then, this attention to the work of machines, unusual one for the artist; more common are land- of ecological devastation, drone warfare, and satellite
if not as negation? Certainly, the romance of old scapes bearing lasting evidence of industrial or mili- surveillance, Barba reminds us that the history of new
media is there. The mechanism of film projection is tary intervention, sometimes in states of ruin, and media and new ways of seeing is also a history of new
discernible through observation in a manner impos- sites devoted to the institutional storage of cultural forms of domination.
sible with the mysterious black boxes of electronic materials. (Arguably, Calder’s studio is a loose fit with If this recognition of the entanglement of progress
media, and Barba’s interventions make it only more the last.) Barba’s films tend to be concerned with pro- and barbarism sounds like an echo of Walter Benjamin,
so. She emphasizes the thingness of film, its tactility— cesses of inscription and endurance, acts that link that is because the philosopher is one of Barba’s key
a quality that has to some extent been retroactively them not only to the indexicality of film but to the points of reference. He is quoted directly in Bending
produced by the advent of digital technologies. She handwriting that appears so often across the artist’s to Earth and Subconscious Society. The former cites
does not, however, suggest that this distinction practice. Survival is a concept understood here in all Benjamin’s work on mechanical reproduction, while
between film and digital maps onto a parallel opposi- its ambivalence, encompassing the inheritance of pol- the latter invokes the figure of the ragpicker, whom
tion between the artisanal and the industrial. Rather, lution and patrimony alike. Benjamin understood as a metaphor for Baudelaire’s
her sculptural explorations of filmic materiality serve Films such as Somnium (2011), Subconscious poetic method, a way of coaxing new meanings out
to foreground cinema as a machine of the mechanical Society, a Feature (2014), and Bending to Earth (2015) of the refuse of industrial modernity.
272 ARTFORUM
We might extend this Benjaminian reading of the
ragpicker to Barba’s approach both to the material of
film and to the industrial topographies that populate
her works. Celluloid itself is scavenged from the scrap
heap, becoming available for new uses, open to new
meanings—a reflection on the hollow promise of tech-
nological novelty foremost among them. At the same
time, through mechanical reproduction, Barba situ-
ates selected landscapes within a larger consideration
of the ways in which the natural becomes artificial
and the artificial natural. In a sense, her works evoke
the legacy of Land art, but in place of its concern with
heroic acts of production, she fastens on reproduction
and redeployment. Why should she make vast cuts,
orchestrate graphic patterns, or stage entropic ruin-
ation, when all are available as readymades to be
found and captured by her camera?
The ragpicker’s redemptive gleaning is also a pro-
foundly temporal operation. It constitutes a defeat of
the linear notion of technological progress, with its
capitalist rhythms of novelty and obsolescence, in
favor of a condensation of nonsynchronous tempo-
ralities in which new and old, past and future, com-
mingle. In this jumble of time, Barba’s view from
above resonates often as a view from the future; this
impression is compounded by the artist’s predilection
for soundtracks combining white noise, snippets of
dialogue, and electronic music. Just as the aerial view
effects a visual defamiliarization of the lived environ-
ment, this science-fiction ambience unsettles a view of
the present. Somnium is named for Johannes Kepler’s
seventeenth-century novel, a science-fiction narrative
about a trip to the moon that includes a detailed
description of the world seen from space, excerpts from
which are read on the soundtrack. In Subconscious
Society, a narrator recounts, via voice-over, “Following
the object crisis of the late twentieth century, the land
has been abandoned. A small group of explorers
returns to a climatically mutated and unrecognizable
continent.” Do we exist after this crisis or does it yet
await us? Barba revels in this undecidability, a state Ben
Lerner so aptly describes in one of his poems: “Seen
from above, exposition, climax, and denouement all
take place at once.” Here, actually existing landscapes
resonate as postapocalyptic remnants of a destroyed
civilization, as photography’s declaration that this has
been meets the speculative power of fiction.
WHAT WILL SURVIVE the storm of progress? Digitization
may have quickly pushed photochemical film into mass-
cultural obsolescence, but as a preservation medium
its stability remains unparalleled. Archivists fear the
unreliability of electronic formats will lead us into a
digital dark age, but film will last. Perhaps we will,
too, if we can find ways to cooperate and live together.
In Disseminate and Hold (2016), The Empirical Effect
SEPTEMBER 2017 273
From Source to Poem (2016), she enters the National
Audio-Visual Conservation Center at the Library of
Congress in Culpeper, Virginia, the world’s largest
multimedia archive. These films convene assemblies
of objects that survive, forming a thick weave of time
by condensing the material of human activity from
diverse periods and locations. Whereas the vanitas
tradition gestures to the transience of all things, these
are structures of a frozen perpetuity. Almost no people
appear, and fittingly so, for the temporality at stake is
a slow chronological grind that abides by an inhuman
scale of measure, invoking processes of accumulation
and storage larger than any individual.
Above: Rosa Barba, The Hidden Conference: About the Discontinuous Of course, such denials of finitude are inevitably
History of Things We See and Don’t See, 2010, 35 mm, color, sound,
13 minutes 40 seconds. From the trilogy The Hidden Conference, 2010–15. its affirmation; what occurs beyond the walls of these
repositories will surely partake of an altogether dif-
ferent economy, a fact signaled by the bleak exterior
landscapes included in From Source to Poem. In the
Tate archives, the suffering meat of a Francis Bacon
figure recalls of the frailty of the flesh amid the impas-
sivity of history. The Audio-Visual Conservation
Center, meanwhile, appears as an abandoned bunker.
Barba films a copy of the Voyager Golden Record,
sent into space in 1977, destined for unknown, pos-
These are films that ask what will
sibly extraterrestrial, recipients. Under her gaze, it is
be kept and what will be lost as the a cipher for all the materials of the archive: There is
catastrophe of modernity pushes no one present to listen to the “sounds of earth,”
which await future listeners who may never appear.
ever onward. When Barba’s sculptural manipulations of analog
materiality are considered alongside these images of
poisoned land and museum vaults, seen as if from a
science-fiction future, it becomes clear that the artist’s
engagement with film stems neither from the debunker’s
desire to puncture its pleasurable spell nor, entirely at
least, from the fetishist’s sentimental attachment to an
imperiled medium. Film figures, rather, as an eruption
of nonlinear time that combines the seriality and auto-
(2009), and sections of Subconscious Society shot mation of mass production with the ability to register
in Manchester’s Albert Hall, Barba finds scenes of col- traces of the world through a relation of touch.
lectivity, inhabitation, and adaptation. On the elevated Belonging neither to the realm of artisanal craft nor
highway Minhocão in São Paulo, in preparations for to digital hegemony, it occupies an impure, intermedi-
evacuation in the event of another eruption of Mount ate position in the history of industrial modernity. It
Vesuvius, or in the dilapidated grandiosity of postin- is a magisterial medium of endurance, one that pro-
dustrial England, people look for ways to live within vides a way into a much larger constellation of earth,
and beyond the specter of ruination. Here, in these human, and machine. Rising waters, dying bees,
collected memories of inhabited place, Barba’s practice archives designed to withstand a nuclear bomb, and
comes closest to evoking something like hope. radioactive waste that will last thousands of years:
A series of works exploring sites devoted to the These are phenomena that speak of a darkening
storage of art and media is less optimistic. Haunted future for our warming planet. There were no good
by the prospect of species extinction, these films find old days, this work reminds us, so it is best not to cling
persistence not in humans but in things. In the trilogy to any nostalgia for the past. Better to join Barba in
The Hidden Conference (2010–15), Barba ventures reading the surviving traces of history as a warning
inside the vaults of four institutions—the Museo for the future.
Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, the
ERIKA BALSOM IS THE AUTHOR OF AFTER UNIQUENESS: A HISTORY OF FILM
Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the Musei Capitolini AND VIDEO ART IN CIRCULATION (COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2017) AND
in Rome, and the Tate Galleries in London—while in A SENIOR LECTURER IN FILM STUDIES AT KING’S COLLEGE LONDON.
274 ARTFORUM
Opposite page, right: Rosa Barba,
The Empirical Effect, 2009, 16 mm
transferred to digital video, color,
sound, 20 minutes.
Right: Rosa Barba, Disseminate
and Hold, 2016, 16 mm transferred
to digital video, color, sound,
21 minutes 13 seconds.
Below: Rosa Barba, From Source to
Poem, 2016, 35 mm, color, sound,
12 minutes.
SEPTEMBER 2017 275
Tommaso Isabella, “Rosa Barba: From Source to Poem to Rythm to Reader“, Mousse, Summer 2017
Jason Farago, “Rosa Barba examines the everyday chaos of Sao Paulo’s ‘giant earthworm’ highway“,
The Guardian, September 20th, 2016
The Guardian, 20.09.2016
Rosa Barba examines the everyday chaos of
São Paulo's 'giant earthworm' highway
She’s explored cities around the world, and now the Italian artist has cast her eye on the Minhocão,
a controversial emblem of a splendidly untidy megalopolis
Jason Farago in São Paulo
Tuesday 20 September 2016 10.00 BST
I n the center of the largest city in Latin America, amid a forest of closely packed
towers, snakes an elevated highway of more than three kilometers, slicing from east to
west. During the week the traffic rumbles past apartment blocks, and cars swing by
the upper floors so closely that residents can almost touch them as they whip past – or,
more frequently, as they idle in São Paulo’s notorious traffic. In the evenings and on
Sundays, when it’s closed to vehicles, paulistanos descend on the elevated highway for
cycling, walking, or partying. What was once a liability for the city’s development has
now been reclaimed; what was once a scar is now almost beautiful.
This is the Minhocão, or “giant earthworm”: an ungainly, controversial, but sometimes
treasured emblem of this splendidly untidy megalopolis of 11 million. And the highway
growls in the shadows of this year’s São Paulo Biennial, the region’s most important
contemporary art exhibition, which opened last week amid political protests. The short
film Disseminate and Hold, by the artist Rosa Barba, introduces into Oscar Niemeyer’s
serene white pavilion the everyday disorder of the elevated highway, backed by a
charging, drum-heavy score by the German-Brazilian group Black Manual. It’s one of the
finest works in the exhibition, and it subtly connects Brazil’s ambitious architectural past
to its troubled political present.
“I’m always attracted by these non-pretty, functional places,” the Italian artist tells me
when we meet for a drink at a rooftop hotel bar – whose privileged view of the sprawling
city offers an apt backdrop. “And Brazil was always a rich place of history for me. The
encounter with Brazil came through readings, through Vilém Flusser’s history here, but
also through the architecture. When I came here last year for research, I walked over the
Minhocão after visiting the Copan building – a worn, serpentine tower designed by
Niemeyer in 1966, closely hemmed in by the highway and the surrounding buildings. “I
was so impressed how, in one second, when the traffic wasn’t allowed to enter anymore,
the people immediately took it over.”
The Minhocão was completed in 1969, at the height of Brazil’s military dictatorship.
(This past June, it was officially renamed the Elevado Presidente João Goulart, in tribute
to the Brazilian president who was ousted by a military junta in 1964.) If your visions of
Brazil tend more to the beaches of Rio or the moonscapes of Brasília, Barba’s film will
introduce you to a rougher, more delirious urbanism. Shooting on foot or from the back
of a car, Barba pans across Brutalist towers, filthy ribbon windows, demotic apartments9/26/2016 Rosa Barba examines the everyday chaos of São Paulo's 'giant earthworm' highway | Art and design | The Guardian festooned with graffiti. And yet its messy, unpredictable character is what makes São Paulo so intoxicating: this is a city where spaces fold into one another and lives collide. Overlaying these shots of São Paulo in Disseminate and Hold is a text by the artist Cildo Meireles, a Brazilian conceptualist and a key figure of cultural opposition to the dictatorship. As Barba pans up from the Minhocão to Niemeyer’s tower, a narrator reads Meireles’s words: “I remember that in 68, 69, 70, as we were on a tangent away from that which mattered” – by that which mattered, he means democracy – “already we no longer worked with metaphors … We were working with the situation itself, the real.” The narration helps to draw an imperfect but fascinating analogy between the public interventions of the Brazilian avant garde during the dictatorship and the contemporary reuse of the Minhocão: a top-down imposition now rethought from the bottom up. “Somehow I thought that this voice of Cildo, the text excerpts, could be a strong voice from the street itself,” Barba explains. “It’s really part of his thinking of the public body. My favorite excerpt is when Cildo says that art can only exist if other people perform it. I was seeing myself performing his voice, and bringing it back to the public.” The São Paulo biennial has always had a strong political focus, and Meireles was one of numerous Brazilian artists to boycott the exhibition of 1969 – the year of the Minhocão’s completion. The artists, some of whom had already gone into exile, stayed away in protest of the military government’s infamous Institutional Act No 5, which suspended habeas corpus, permitted censorship, and soon opened the way to torture. Barba’s film looks at this history too. We see Meireles’s file from the biennial archives, as well as a telegram from Lygia Clark, exiled in Paris, and a postcard from Hélio Oiticica, who’d gone to London. All of them refuse to participate. Suddenly, against the roll of a snare drum, Barba cuts back to the Minhocão: we’re looking at traffic from an overpass, on which someone has spray painted TEMER JAMAIS (“Never Temer”), a rebuke to the new Brazilian president whose ascent has been described by many artists here as a coup. The current upheaval in Brazil had consequences for Barba’s production, but Disseminate and Hold wears its political convictions lightly. “I tried to get material from the Cinemateca, and that week people were fired,” Barba says. “It was quite impossible to pay people: for rental equipment, say. Money was transferred would get stuck, frozen for months, and then you’d have to negotiate what the exchange rate should be … Things were changing every week, and even people in the biennial didn’t know how to handle it. “I was thinking: oh, should I connect it much more to what is happening now? But except for that one shot of TEMER JAMAIS, I actually felt it would be so much stronger if I didn’t close the circle. You are in it anyway. I felt that if I would go there I would close the bottle somehow.” Barba was born in Sicily in 1972. She studied both film-making and fine arts, and you can see that double training in the attention given to her films’ display: rattling projectors sit in the gallery, and film strips are treated as both recordings and physical objects. She now lives in Berlin, and uses the increasingly obsolete medium of celluloid to examine how technological change, political events, or economic transformations are manifest in cities and landscapes. Bending to Earth, which was seen at the last Venice Biennale, orbits around desert sites for radioactive waste storage that, seen from above, appear as serene, monochrome squares. Her omnibus film Subconscious Society passes from https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/sep/20/rosa-barba-sao-paulo-biennial-disseminate-and-hold-film 2/3
9/26/2016 Rosa Barba examines the everyday chaos of São Paulo's 'giant earthworm' highway | Art and design | The Guardian Manchester’s abandoned Albert Hall to the Thames estuary, which Barba filmed from the air as an uncanny collection of outdated industrial sites and abandoned funfairs. She shot it on the very last shipment ever made of Fuji 35mm film. Subconscious Society netted Barba a major prize from the Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco, which also funded this new Brazilian work. But in comparison to the languorous, often sublime films of the last few years, Disseminate and Hold is a more human-scaled work of art. Inhabitants of the apartments bordering the Minhocão speak of the highway’s place in their lives; they sit and kibitz on a highway divider, and by the film’s end they are dancing across the giant earthworm. Geography bears the scars of politics, but people can make an impact too. Barba, at one point, struts down the Minhocão on a Sunday morning, camera in hand. The sun shines down, and the tangle of roads and buildings looks almost pastoral: with no cars, the road has become an unexpected place of relaxation in a very jittery city. “It becomes this public body, the street,” Barba attests. “It’s a performative manifestation all the time. You can expand the public’s voice – maybe in a much more powerful way – if you take over architecture in the city.” More interviews Topics Art Video art Brazil Americas Save for later Article saved Reuse this content https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/sep/20/rosa-barba-sao-paulo-biennial-disseminate-and-hold-film 3/3
Gillian Young, “Rosa Barba”, Art In America, February 2016
Art in America, February 2016The Boston Globe, 29.10.2015
Sebastian Smee, “Using dated technology, Rosa Barba evokes the sublime“, The Boston Globe, Octo-
ber 29th, 2015
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ART REVIEW
Using dated technology, Rosa
Barba evokes the sublime
PETER HARRIS STUDIOS
Installation view of Rosa Barba’s exhibition “The Color Out of Space” at MIT’s List
Center.
By Sebastian Smee GLO BE S TA F F OCTOBER 29, 2015
We think of imagination as limitless. It is not. It can come up against its
own limits very quickly, and when it does, it simply sputters out, like the
end of a celluloid reel.
When that happens, we sometimes invoke an old aesthetic category, the
“sublime.” The sublime occurs when the mind conceives of an idea that the
imagination can present no example of. Infinity is an obvious example.Absolutes of size (big or small) also qualify.
And then there are those concepts — deep time, deep space, nuclear
annihilation, and so on — that flirt with the sublime: We may be able to
imagine them, but they are very hard indeed to get our heads around, and
we feel our imaginative capacities breaking apart as we try.
This is a roundabout way into a review of a brilliant new show by the Italian
artist Rosa Barba at the List Visual Arts Center at MIT. But it seems
necessary because the show itself — which is terrifically satisfying to eye,
ear, mind, and heart — is about the distance between what can be known
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and what can be imagined.
Comments
Its title, “The Color Out of Space,” is shared by the most recent work in it.
Unlike the other pieces, all of which use the obsolescent medium of
celluloid film, “The Color Out of Space” uses high-definition video to project
images of outer space onto a wall.
What results visually, however, is in fact less crisp than the earlier whirring
and flickering celluloid projections, because it is filtered through a series of
colored glass panels. Accompanying audio, which splices together the voices
of scientists, artists, and writers all reflecting on the universe, helps us
understand why: Astronomers use methods equivalent to these glass color
filters to bring out the different colors of planets, which would otherwise all
look white and blurry to the human eye.
That’s just one instance of the compromised, distorted, and partial methods
we depend on to observe the universe. Since our observations require light,
and since light traverses space at a limited speed, through phenomena that
bend or distort it in innumerable and unknowable ways, what we are able to
observe of the universe is not only, by the time we see it, in the far-distant
past, but garbled in manifold other ways, too.“And so,” as the lucid voice of one scientist explains, “we see the universe in a very funny way.” Or as another offers — subtly surpassing Plato’s Allegory of the Cave — when you look at the universe, “you’re looking at a shadow of something that doesn’t exist.” Barba was born in Agrigento, in Sicily, in 1972. She has featured prominently in the past two Venice Biennales. Her work is not only about the sublime, but also about obsolescence. In the same way that other artists might use driftwood or mangled car parts, she uses an obsolescent technology — celluloid film — to make moving “sculptures” that draw attention to the poetry inherent in outmoded ways of seeing. One work, for instance, consists of a swaying, vibrating film projector hanging by long loops of celluloid. It projects a rectangle of flickering light onto a wall that is adjacent to a large tinted-glass window. Another equally mesmerizing work consists of two projectors facing each other on the floor. Both project bright monochrome rectangles onto a small screen that stands between them. Where the colors overlap, new colors are created. It’s a work that obviously relates to the colored-glass filters in “The Color Out of Space,” but it is also a thing of wonder and beauty in itself. Barba likes her works to operate in these two ways: as things in themselves, and as poetry, metaphors, incitements to thought. Nearby works do still more wondrous things with motors, celluloid, and light. If outer space triggers one manifestation of the sublime, another is triggered by the disconnect between our contemporary urban lifestyles — paved streets, plumbing, shopping centers, tidy gardens, cafes — and the unseen immensity of the industries that make these lifestyles possible: oil drilling, mining, power stations, undersea cables and networks of radio towers, electrical grids, chemical manufacturing, container shipping, all on a mind-shattering scale.
ROSA BARBA Film still from “Time As Perspective.” Barba deals with the late capitalist-industrial sublime in two major works here. One, “Time as Perspective,” shows pumpjacks nodding away in the west Texas desert. This (mostly) bird’s-eye footage of a technology that seems close to redundant is accompanied by a sort of postindustrial white- noise soundtrack, and interspersed with snippets of text that coax the mind into considering space as a function of time. A second, more ambitious film, “Somnium,” shows wintry footage of industrial harbors and snow-covered shores on the North Sea, immediately invoking a chilling version of our present-day industrial sublime. Voice- over fragments connect this present with a futuristic, J. G. Ballard-like scenario of environmental pollution on a distant planet, and a literary past — the film was inspired by a 17th-century novel by Johannes Kepler, often regarded as the first work of science fiction.
ROSA BARBA Film still from “Somnium.” Time, space, obsolescence, and beekeeping are all combined in this strange cocktail, but the film itself feels surprisingly simple and clear. It’s very arresting to look at. MIT, of course, possesses its own kind of sublime: the marriage of scientific enquiry, technological innovation, and corporate and military might, often outstripping the ability to imagine consequences. The institute’s dazzling record of innovation is, of course, continually being overtaken by obsolescence, which is part of what makes it so stimulating to see Barba’s provocative work there. aRT REVIEW ROSA BARBA: The Color Out of Space At List Visual Arts Center through Jan. 3. 617-253-4680, listart.mit.edu
Michele Robecchi, “Rosa Barba. Metaphors for history, time and society”, Artpulse, 2015
ATP, I’ll be there forever | Interview with Rosa Barba, May 2015
ATP, I’ll be there forever | Interview with Rosa Barba, May 2015
Henriette Huldisch, “Unmoored Future”, Artforum, September 2013
Rosa Barba: Pensiero Spaziolungo, Frieze, November 2018
Rosa Barba Affinità Cosmiche, The Good Life, November 2018
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