From Source to Poem

Rosa Barba’s films and sculptures bring together memory and fiction, documentary-style narrative and sci-fi storytelling, in a wide-ranging reflection on the poetic qualities of landscape as a place deeply engraved with the traces of history. Primarily employing 16 and 35 mm film — both as a medium, and for the sculptural and material qualities of the film stock, beams of light and projectors — Barba probes its limits and possibilities, turning the traditional cinematic viewing experience on its head and challenging the notion of linear time.

Throughout Barba’s work we find portraits of obsolete architecture and natural landscapes, scenes from remote deserts, skeletons of industrial buildings, and fragments of writing and words from artists, poets, and geographers. The artist presents these places as spaces of memory, where certitudes coexist with vulnerabilities, and the past merges with a constantly unfolding present.

On the occasion of her exhibition at CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, Rosa Barba makes a new 35mm film to be screened in the monumental space of the Nave. Shot in the USA, at the largest media archive worldwide — the Library of Congress Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Conservation in Culpeper, Virginia — the film From Source to Poem investigates what could be seen as the cultural legacy of twentieth-century Western civilization. In the artist’s own words: “With this new 35mm film I’d like to examine further the geographies we create around us. I’d like to start a dialogue on the meaning and content of the collective effort in storing cultural values.”

Besides this monumental screening, the audience will also discover a new light installation entitled Hear, There, Where the Echoes Are — following on from the White Museum series — consisting of diverse cinematographic projectors orchestrated according to a synchronised sequence. On the opening night, the activation of each projector will be decided according to the rhythm of Chad Taylor’s live sound performance. This choreography, configured in the context of a collective listening, will remain like an after-image in the installation, the piece functioning afterwards as a sculpture orchestrated in the space with its visitors.

Curator: Maria Inés Rodriguez

Rosa Barba, From Source to Poem, film 35mm, colour, optical sound, 12’, is a co-production of CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, with the participation of Tabakalera, Donostia