Rosa Barba - Buckle & Jitter

The Last few feet of film running inside the camera housing tend to buckle and jitter, producing overexposed splotches that seem to feed on the celluloid itself, like spreading fungal growth or delicate flames … (Carlos Enrique Garza Caballero)

Rosa Barba (1972) is fascinated by voids, the ‘spaces-in between’, transitional phases where meaning dissolves for a moment, leaving behind a glimpse of incompleteness. Her film installations reveal a poetry of serendipity: they are cinematographic labyrinths, revealing various layers and forms in an intricate game of light and shadow, moving forward on the tension between image and non-image, duration and moment, between time, dragging on, and the singular instance. 'Expanded cinema', in more than one meaning: Barba makes use of the physical aspect of the medium as a protagonist in her account, which reaches out far beyond the projection field. The network of projectors and reels is not concealed, it plays an explicit role in the illusory world. The structure is inherent to each aspect of the installations: the projection mechanism, the celluloid, the environment, the spectator and the content of the films themselves. The images are defined by the void or ‘temps mort’, referring to the modernist cinema by Antonioni, Tarkovsky or Straub. Pale shapes appear and dissolve, familiar at first glance, but mere shades of imperfection on further consideration, existing in a haze of passing encounters between moments and spaces. This suggestive power is further reinforced by the soundtracks, established from digitally processed field recordings, familiar yet sketchy, tangibly and also far removed. The dialogue of images and sounds, the visible and the invisible, freed from linear narrative structures, generates associations, concurring and breaking up again. It is a cinema of imperfection and the imagination, requiring a constant shift of perspective and a conjunction of various angles, a cinema of the surface, not merely gleaming and sparkling, but also watching, staring and inciting.

Apart from installations Barba also works on short and longer films and on video clips. For the latter she already did some work with Microstoria, Mouse On Mars and Niobe, formations she also performs live with.

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Rosa Barba - Buckle & Jitter
Three Filminstallations