The film Bending to Earth is a further investigation into inscriptions and transformations of society manifested in the landscape. Several radioactive fields are circled by a hand camera in a helicopter, while a recorded voice-over which appears through several—often distorted—world radio stations describes the materials of those constructions and opens up a mediation of order systems and landscape archives. The fields represent a sort of alphabet of an image engineered in the earth; the camera is an observer of this document and its relation to reality, not just as a pre-existent form but as a potential or imagined object—the part that remains behind the scene, the break within the narrative.

Bending to Earth

Aggregate States of Matters highlights the ambiguous relationship between humans and nature. For her new 35mm film shot in Peru, Rosa Barba worked with communities that are affected by the melting of a glacier and geological time becoming exposed. Barba shows the slow disappearance of the glacier and the perception of this fact within the Quechuan population in the Andes. While exploring different local myths, she outlines the possibility of translating ancient knowledge into the present time.

Aggregate States of Matters

It is an investigation into the loaded, transforming topography that is already palpable in the landscape, before we actually understand what language it creates for our society.

Inside the Outset: Evoking a Space of Passage

The new 16mm film Radiant Exposures—Facts Run on Light Beams These Days (the latter part of the title quotes from Donna Haraway) returns to Rosa Barba’s long-standing motif of the desert and its exploration of modern archives as a manifestation of human’s desire for progress. As in previous films, Radiant Exposures—Facts Run on Light Beams These Days appears to portray a site out of time and space—ethereal, timeless and unearthly.  The predominant motif of the film is the human-made landscape with large expanses of rectangular panels reflecting the sun light. These reflective panels are in fact concentrating  sunlight, creating and collecting energy. The presence of the sun is made palpable by the shimmering light and the and the blurring of the imagery.