From Source to Poem to Rhythm to Reader

A project that brings together fourteen works made from 2009 until 2016, including 35mm and 16mm films, kinetic sculptures, and site-specific interventions. Barba’s exhibition “From Source to Poem to Rhythm to Reader,” hosted in the Shed space of Pirelli HangarBicocca, weaves an intense dialogue between the works on view and the industrial setting that houses them. The five films in the show, seen here for the first time in Italy, include The Empirical Effect (2009), a film set around Vesuvius—for Rosa Barba a metaphor for the complex relationships between society and politics in Italy—, and the artist’s two most recent works: Enigmatic Whisper (2017), shot in the studio of artist Alexander Calder, and From Source to Poem (2016), a densely layered audio-visual narration, increasingly overlapping and condensing, analogous to white noise, filmed in the Audio-Visual Conservation Center of the Library of Congress in Culpeper, Virginia, the world’s largest multimedia archive – a film specifically co-produced for the exhibition.