Rosa Barba. From Source to Poem to Rhythm to Reader

Rosa Barba’s solo exhibition “From Source to Poem to Rhythm to Reader,” curated by Roberta Tenconi, is a project that brings together fourteen works made since 2009, including 35mm and 16mm films, kinetic sculptures, and site-specific interventions. 

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.

Powerfully striking images, portraits of obsolete architecture and natural landscapes, and visions of remote deserts turn up throughout her works, combined with fragments of text and scenarios where past and present intertwine.