Rosa barba

2019

Lima
March 2019

Aggregate States of Matters is a film that the artist is currently shooting in Peru that will be released in May this year in the context of the exhibition Time, Forward! at the V-A-C Zattere in Venice. Barba has consistently pushed the boundaries of film by exploring its spatiotemporal dimension and experimenting with time-based forms.

For her new film, shot in Peru, Barba wants to work cinematically with the communities that are affected (for good and bad) by the actual glacier (which glacier? Where?) melting and their geological time. The slow disapearance of the glacier is creating a sort of goldrush for the farming communities with new opportunities and changes for their lives – even it
it is temporary. It will address, like in my previous films, human attempts to tame nature and is comprised of similar collective performances in which the memories of the characters involved interact with the scenario in the landscape.

“Throughout my work, I question how we occupy space by investigating crisis
through an unusual treatment of time and language. Time is conceived as an
accumulation, an archive, rather than a linear progression. Language is
abstracted, eluding its typical semiotic function. The destabilizing effects of the
stories are activated by my use of both fundamental concepts (time and
language) in these non-traditional ways. Spatial examination unfolds through the
deconstruction of the cinematic apparatus and filmic environment, which is
constituted both by film’s physical materials—projectors, screens and
celluloid— and its ambient elements: time, space, light and sound. Therefore, I
use cinema in order to stage an intervention in a real space, confronting the
division between public and private, fantasy and reality.”

ROSA BARBA

Rosa Barba (Agrigento,1972) lives and works in Berlin. She has a sculptural approach to film and the ways it articulates space, placing the work and the viewer in a new relationship. Her works encompass films, sculptures, installations, text pieces, and publications grounded in the material and conceptual qualities of cinema. Barba 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. She studied at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne and completed her PhD in Fine Arts at the Malmö Art Academy in 2018. Her work is part of numerous public and private collections and was awarded various renowned prizes. Barba has exhibited in internationally acclaimed institutions and took part in recent biennales in São Paulo, Venice, and Berlin.