Rosa Barba

The cinematic works of Rosa Barba capture the moment before a crucial action. Describing an intermediate condition where the meaning for an instance dissolves to leave a view of incompleteness behind.  The works confront the public with the experience of possibilities and occasionally with its mere absence.  Barba works with film, sound, text and photography.  Many of the film and sound works are about incidents, which show signs to be on their way, but do not fulfil themselves. What exactly takes place remains open and will be the product of our fantasies, our memory and our assumptions. Established amongst invention, scientific analysis, volition and imagination the plots of Rosa Barba’s stories grow at the seams of the construction of fictitious and authentic realities.  The tension of duration and moment (extended time vis-a-vis a single instant), lined up events and minimal sensations create the imaginary paths of her network.

Rosa Barba's work on BAC  

Parachutable
16mm, 2 films, colour, optical sound, 5min, 2004
Parachutable is a 16mm loop projection in which two disembodied voices occupy the image of an airplane hangar and an architectral model of the same building. A visionary building contructed by the architect Alfred Hardy with the aim to dissapear in the landscape in a specific daylight. The images alternate synchronously in different lightning with empty white frames as the dialogue gradually turns to visionary ideas of escape and dissapearance.

Voices: Laetitia Sadier, Ain Bailey

Pirate Rooms
35mm Filminstallation, 2002
The film installation Pirate Rooms frisks the empty spaces of an imaginary city. The spaces seem to be connected to a web not recorded on a map. The Pirate Rooms are places promising possibilities, gaps, vessels of ideas, centres of storms. The rooms appear light and calm, even though the camera scans through them impatiently. The film projector is reeling back and forth, slowing down, stopping, as if an invisible operator were examining the material in a search for something. It is made manifest as a sound inquiry of a process, perhaps the indecisive eye of an editor – not being able to make up her/his mind about how to assemble the material ­under investigation.

Again and again, prints of the ground set between the camera and the motif: there are awkward beings, mathematical codes appearing and disappearing in odd ways, and hindering the inquiry, but at the same time delivering new hints. The rewinding and forwarding of the projector produces combinatorial results, details become visible and the coherence of the depicted emerges. Nothing in the rooms is functioning right: doors close by themselves, others are doubled, passageways lead to nowhere, elsewhere an exit opens in the ground, the window leading outside reflects the room itself. Ghosts of emerging formulas of ground plans haunt an irrational architecture. It is no misleading image and any lunatic labyrinth, just places holding their own fantasies.

The especially constructed 35mm projector is conducted by a barcode attached to the film; the film material itself describes the ground plan as a visible sculpture in the exhibition space.

Sound: Jan St. Werner
Programming: Gaspar Benedek,
Anselm Weidmann

Machine Vision Seekers
16mm Film Installation, 2003
A script is projected. The story, a kind of ‘science-fiction emigration’, is situated in the dark. Some people are walking along a corridor underneath the earth surface to reach their original point of departure. The text toys around with the visualisation of words which describe the invisible pictures in the dark.
Rosa Barba makes use of a moving projector, which literally throws the words onto the wall. That partly aggressive act is also a reference to the blindness of the protagonists in the text
and to the several layers in the storyline (in the sense that the projector is abandoning the two-dimensional screen). Machine Vision Seekers shifts between the projector and the viewer, a deconstructed screening where all parts, visible and non-visible are interlinked. It is a conversation between the projection apparatus, the setting in the room, the spectator, the film itself and the plot, a structure which is inherent in every aspect of the installation and which has to be deciphered by the viewer.

Split fields
3 films, 16mm, optical sound, 3.30min, 2003

In order to get the raw material for this installation Rosa Barba travelled to Naples, where she shot 16mm film images in the villages surrounding the volcano of Vesuvius. The artist relates living in the danger zone surrounding a dormant volcano to the mafia terror in the region. An existential theme: underneath a continuous yet slumbering threat the inhabitants wait until the bitter end (suddenly) pops up. Barba’s film loop, curling its way through the space and in between the three projectors, mixes in documentary with fictional images. We get to see, for instance, the abandoned villa of a murdered mafia leader, people shopping in a supermarket at the bottom of the volcano, or a man who – unambiguously symbolic – makes his cat walk along the edges of the stairwell.
Even though the population seems to have forgotten all about the ever present danger of the Vesuvius, images of fireproof hides in the woods suggest that everybody is well-prepared.

Printed Cinema
printed matter, colour an black and white, pages varying, appearance in different locations between 2004-2006
The publication project Printed Cinema - ten irregular periodical issues - continues Rosa Barba audiovisual work as a personal reflection on the essence of the cinematographic: images are merely articulated in the space in-between images. Gaps, ellipses, dialectics between images - essentially modernist notions - are essential in that respect. In Printed cinema this is expressed in the editing principle, as well as the oppositions between film and printing, between text and image. Apart from the specific distribution method, of course, which extends the project into a wide range of cultural and social contexts. In this way Printed Cinema challenges the outer edges of the artist's book. Mechanisms proper to the film medium find their translation in a different context.
Printed Cinema#1Broadcasting from Home, appeared as a free supplement to the first season issue of the Austrian art magazine Springerin. Printed Cinema #2 Parachutable Obstacles was distributed by the Australian Center of Contemporary Art (ACCA), on the occasion of the exhibition A Molecular History of Everything. Printed Cinema #3 Accidental Suspension is is distributed by the art gallery of York University Toronto in May and June 2005 at the occasion of the exhibition Horror, Science Fiction and Porn. Printed Cinema #4 , who can tell if i am inventing? will be distributed while the Istanbul Biennale in the Hospitality Zone. Issue number 5 will be distributed from the Kunstverein and Fridericianium in Kassel in occasion of the exhibition in the Kunstverein in November 2005.
The magazines are produced with argos in Brussels and artimo in Amsterdam.

It’s gonna happen
16mm, colour, optical sound, 3min, 2005
The Film is separated in two different narrations, one is played back from the optical sound track of the movie, where we listen to a fictional phonecall conversation of „a“ president and his collaborator, planing a coup for the same night.
The images show synchronously a description –projected as a filmscript– of the city by night in which the phonecall takes place.

Voices: Joel Ryan, Michel Waisvisz

Rosa Barba's work on BAC