Rosa Barba makes artworks with film. But you wouldn’t call them movies.
Sometimes she shoots them with 35-millimeter cameras and beams them onto screens. Other times, she turns celluloid and projectors into whirring sculptures, or choreographs musical performances with flickering light.
“Film is kind of the key word,” Barba, 52, said recently. “But, in the end, maybe you can’t say they are films anymore: It’s a film about film, or it’s about the idea of a film.”
Film might be her medium, material or subject, but there are many other ideas in Barba’s works, too — about ecology, landscape, science and the nature of knowledge. All her signature obsessions come together at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from May 3, where an installation of her work, called “The Ocean of One’s Pause,” runs through July 6 in the museum’s Kravis Studio, a space devoted to experimentation.
The presentation brings together 12 works from the last 16 years, with performances on six dates throughout the run, that add up to a statement on her expanded understanding of cinema
“Cinema, for me, is the moment when you start a kind of embarkation,” Barba said in an interview at her Berlin studio. It wasn’t just light, sound, or movement, she said; it was “a chemical reaction” when those elements come together and trigger or unveil something for the viewer — Holland Cotter of The New York Times once described this as an ability “to knock the pins out from under tyrant logic and clear a space where difference can thrive.”
Barba, who was born in Sicily but grew up mostly in Germany, has been working with film since the beginning of her career — and liberating it from its original use. As a teenager interested in photography, she was traveling yearly by train to visit relatives in the south. “I was basically just looking out of the windows for two days and also taking pictures,” she said.
The shifting landscape, and the difference between the teeming chaos of Sicily and her organized German hometown left an indelible mark on her work, in which precisely controlled machines create exuberant effects. Her studio suggested a similar push and pull, with its clutter of sculptures in progress and a neat archive of film reels against one wall.
“Looking at those contrasts, they were so formative for my work,” she said of her childhood trips. “There was a lot of material that came from going back and forth.”
When she was getting started, in the ’90s, most movies and art films were shot on celluloid. As digital technology began taking over in the early 2000s, Barba stuck with analog. She still sometimes shoots on a 16-millimeter camera she has owned since her early 20s, and her sculptures often repurpose the mechanical devices of film-era cinema.
A work in the MoMA show, for instance, called “Composition in Field,” is a light box overlaid with a lattice of text-printed celluloid strips, cracking as they turn on motorized reels. Another sculptural installation, “Spacelength Thought,” has a typewriter tapping out a poem onto a length of blank film, so that the letters shine onto a wall when the strip runs through a projector.
“It’s not so much about being obsessed with equipment, or nostalgic for film,” Barba said. “It’s just that I think I can’t really be so playful with the new technologies. There are just a lot of things that you can set free — in your mind or in the space — when you play around with these objects and machines.”
“I don’t think I’m super nerdy about it,” she said, laughing. “Though maybe that’s what it feels like.”
When Barba embarks on a major project, the first step is a long period of research. For her installation “Aggregate State of Matters” — which is downstairs in MoMA’s permanent collection — she spent weeks living and traveling with Indigenous Quechua people in Peru across a rugged landscape that was changing as a nearby glacier melted.
The group welcomed her, Barba said, and though she does not speak the Quechua language, she was able to communicate through a member who spoke Spanish. (Barba spoke to her in Italian, and somehow they muddled through.) “There was also a lot of body language and just going with the flow,” she said.
This part of the process was, in some ways, similar to the method of a documentary filmmaker, Barba said, though it was also like a scientist’s: “You have absolutely no clue if anything useful comes out of it.”
The result of her experiment in Peru, however, is nothing like a documentary.
Back in her studio, Barba edited the material from the field trip into a 21-minute film that is beamed from a customized projection system. There are no talking heads, just a succession of fleeting landscape images, overlaid with chattering voices and text, set to a thrumming soundtrack.
As the stories of the Quechua people float layered over the visuals, the film draws something ineffable and sublime from the landscape in a way that would be out of scope for straight reportage. As an artist, Barba said, she can bring “different elements into play.”
That alchemy is also a feature of her 26-minute film “Charge,” which MoMA commissioned with the Vega Foundation, a Toronto-based nonprofit, as a focal point for “The Ocean of One’s Pause.”
The piece began with immersive research as Barba and her camera roamed a space observatory in Nançay, central France, where scientists use radio waves to build a picture of the universe. She had many long conversations with Philippe Zarka, the observatory’s deputy director, to spark her work.
“She is not a scientist, of course,” Zarka said, but as an artist, she had a different job: “to transform this interest into something that can generate emotions.”
“Charge” has a moody, mysterious tone, and there is a melancholy note when Barba’s camera lingers on the observatory’s weathered 1960s satellite dishes. There is awe, too, when she zooms out wide on one of the radio telescope’s central contraptions, which chugs along a track in front of a huge white surface that looks like a movie theater screen.
Barba sent a recording of that machine’s sound to the jazz percussionist Chad Taylor, a frequent collaborator, and asked him to drum along with it for the soundtrack. The audio also features droning sounds, played by the artist herself on cello.
For the performances in “The Ocean of One’s Pause,” Barba and Taylor will reunite with their instruments in the Kravis Studio, joined by the singer Alicia Hall Moran. Using software that Barba developed, the performers’ sounds will activate projectors and set sculptures in the gallery in motion, filling the room with light and movement.
This, in turn, creates a spirited interplay between the musicians and the visuals, Taylor explained by phone from his home in Chicago. “The frequency triggers a projector, and that beams light,” he said. “I’m also seeing that light, and that’s going to determine what I’m playing next. So in a way, it’s an improvisation with this art installation.”
Stuart Comer, the MoMA curator overseeing the show, said the result would be “thrilling for visitors, because you see the entire thing being activated and animated in this extremely dynamic way.”
“It’s not just an image that carries a recording and sound together,” Comer said. “It’s all in dialogue, and it’s all happening simultaneously.”
Several art forms have been intersecting in Barba’s life since her childhood near Stuttgart, in southern Germany, where she took classes in dance, flute and guitar before settling on cello. At 14, she got interested in photography and started taking portraits and landscape shots, which she developed in a school dark room or at home in the bathroom.
“I really loved this kind of alchemy,” she recalled, “making the image come out, and also manipulating it.”
She was also watching a lot of movies back then, and was drawn to the work of Italian auteurs like Pier Paolo Pasolini and Federico Fellini, who thought of his own films like paintings. When she received a Super 8 camera as a gift, she began to experiment with making her own moving images.
She studied at the forward-thinking Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, Germany — “one of the first schools where you could basically study film and art in the same space,” Barba said — and her teachers there included the experimental filmmaker Harun Farocki and the Austrian performance artist Valie Export.
Postgraduate studies then took her to the prestigious Rijksakademie in Amsterdam and to the Malmö Art Academy in Sweden, which awarded her a Ph.D. for a dissertation, “On the Anarchic Organization of Cinematic Spaces,” which ranges across astronomy, art history, color theory and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze.
These days, she spends a lot of time on the move. Though she has lived in Berlin since 2009, Barba estimated that she was traveling for about six months each year: researching projects, filming, or installing shows. Berlin was “a good place to think and to work,” she said, “but on the other hand, I guess I get most of the mental work done being on the road.”
When Barba is away, she always makes time for the cinema. In New York, she loves going to Light Industry, the experimental film theater in Brooklyn, she said, and on a recent visit to the city, she caught “The Brutalist” on a 35-millimeter print at the Roxy in downtown Manhattan. The idea of the movie’s 15-minute intermission had excited her conceptually, she said.
She carried a whole cosmos of theory with her into the theater. “It is not always completely in the forefront, but it does mean I watch a film differently,” Barba said. “But then, yes, also,” she added, “sometimes I am just chilling out.”
Matthew Anderson is the European Culture Editor of The New York Times.
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