Rosa Barba
18 Nov 2007 - 06 Jan 2008
ROSA BARBA
"They Shine"
Rosa Barba presents three new film installations specially for Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam, which she made as a result of her stay in the Mojave Desert in the United States.
Rosa Barba is known for film installations in which cinematographic means such as image, sound, subtitling and projection methods are analysed and restructured.
Most recently she has produced the short ‘docufiction’ Outwardly from Earth’s Center, about an island that is in danger of disappearing. The film is a psychoanalytical investigation into how the identity of a society, which once will vanish, can be saved. What begins as a documentary ends up as a wild fantasy about how this Scandinavian island can be rescued from the clutches of the waves.
The three new film works in the exhibition ‘They Shine’ at Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam occupy the middle ground between a purely cinematographic idiom and
documentary. The scene of the action is the Mojave Desert in western America. Around the Second World War this vast area became a testing site, primarily for military purposes. Weapons of all kind – atomic bombs, rockets, aeroplanes and vehicles competing for land speed records – were frequently present in this desert.
The use of the Mojave Desert as a test site has altered various areas into settings that have become as strikingly futuristic as they are ruinous – the gigantic solar energy panel and windmill parks sit alongside the abandoned bunker complexes, trailer parks, heaps of scrap metal, and the largest aeroplane graveyard in the world.
Barba shows these locations in three different film installations, accompanied by statements from local residents as the images pass before our eyes. What emerges from this amalgamation is a totally idiosyncratic way of thinking about these objects: divorced from technological reality, guided by an equally disconnected, utopian and/or religious faith associated with the power of technology. The 16mm and 35mm film images of the vast desert form a timeless backdrop for a reality that seems to have been filmed in the future rather than the present, with ‘archaeological’ sites that slowly but surely attain a mythological status, just like science fiction.
Ultimately, ‘They Shine’ can be read as a metaphor for the modernist era. Modernism still plays an important role, but the technological crux of it has become a misunderstood archaeological relic. And that must be seen against the backdrop of the United States today, where both religious and technological fundamentalism flourishes as never before.
"They Shine"
Rosa Barba presents three new film installations specially for Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam, which she made as a result of her stay in the Mojave Desert in the United States.
Rosa Barba is known for film installations in which cinematographic means such as image, sound, subtitling and projection methods are analysed and restructured.
Most recently she has produced the short ‘docufiction’ Outwardly from Earth’s Center, about an island that is in danger of disappearing. The film is a psychoanalytical investigation into how the identity of a society, which once will vanish, can be saved. What begins as a documentary ends up as a wild fantasy about how this Scandinavian island can be rescued from the clutches of the waves.
The three new film works in the exhibition ‘They Shine’ at Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam occupy the middle ground between a purely cinematographic idiom and
documentary. The scene of the action is the Mojave Desert in western America. Around the Second World War this vast area became a testing site, primarily for military purposes. Weapons of all kind – atomic bombs, rockets, aeroplanes and vehicles competing for land speed records – were frequently present in this desert.
The use of the Mojave Desert as a test site has altered various areas into settings that have become as strikingly futuristic as they are ruinous – the gigantic solar energy panel and windmill parks sit alongside the abandoned bunker complexes, trailer parks, heaps of scrap metal, and the largest aeroplane graveyard in the world.
Barba shows these locations in three different film installations, accompanied by statements from local residents as the images pass before our eyes. What emerges from this amalgamation is a totally idiosyncratic way of thinking about these objects: divorced from technological reality, guided by an equally disconnected, utopian and/or religious faith associated with the power of technology. The 16mm and 35mm film images of the vast desert form a timeless backdrop for a reality that seems to have been filmed in the future rather than the present, with ‘archaeological’ sites that slowly but surely attain a mythological status, just like science fiction.
Ultimately, ‘They Shine’ can be read as a metaphor for the modernist era. Modernism still plays an important role, but the technological crux of it has become a misunderstood archaeological relic. And that must be seen against the backdrop of the United States today, where both religious and technological fundamentalism flourishes as never before.