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РОзА БАРБА
ROsA BARBA
48
The Long Road (2010) was filmed in Utah and pursues my
previous investigations of the undercurrents of textual and
visual narratives; here, specifically relating to deserted
areas of the North American countryside, the wastelands
of civilisation. Historical traces of the recent past, markers
of past actions, open up the discordances of uncannily
naturalized environments. The Long Road delineates its
hidden tracks in the constant ambiguities of the landscape’s
functional and aesthetic qualities, in constructing a narration
of discordance: involuntarily, fragments of late modern art
histories come to the fore, not appearing as monumental
historical sites but as remnants of an ever-present past.
The Long Road scrutinizes a huge provisional racetrack,
which was in working use for only for a few weeks before it
was abandoned forever. The film is shot
on 35mm from an aerial view. The camera slowly circles
the racetrack, guiding our gaze, and turning the track
into a monumental earthwork. The rupture between past
and future is accompanied by a double-stranded sound-
track with music by Jan St. Werner and a spoken text by
Robert Creeley.
Pages 42–43 and 45:
Stills from The Long Road, 2010
35mm, optical sound, 6 minutes 10 seconds
courtesy rosa barba, carlier | gebauer, berlin and giΌ marconi, milan
Pages 46–47 and 48:
Stills from Let me see it, 2009
16mm film,optical sound, 4 minutes 10 seconds
courtesy rosa barba, carlier | gebauer, berlin and giΌ marconi, milan
rosa barba was born 1972 in italy. she now lives and works in germany. barba’s films construct utopias or
possible worlds, which evolve from a craving to take action, which is produced by the voids and displacements
of our everyday reality. Using film formats, celluloid and projectors, barba assembles an installative set up for
an artistic production in which film is employed to register asynchronicities and breachings in past and present.
Let me see it (2009) is more of an audioplay than a movie.
The grainy images of Let me see it (2009) depict a seascape,
the coastline of an undefined location at night, in which
only the last red shimmers of the sun and the lights of the
houses on the ground illuminate the scenery. We hear the
drone voice of a sleepy narrator, telling a story about a man
who looses his eyesight. The man’s friend is helping him
to memorize objects in his home which have been mislaid,
in particular a strange object referred to as a dodecahedron
which can no longer be visualized, nor described in words.
It becomes crucial to the man’s regression. The images of
the night flight over an archipelago become a metaphor for
the search for his memories and the fading of his formerly
consistent world. It is an aerial perspective, filmed from the
small cabin of a charter plane, which, irritatingly, hardly
appears to move. The image seems to be held in one position,
our gaze runs back over the same scenery, while the camera
moves.
Time and place here become a sensation specific to this
very moment, rather than a given structure through which
perception gives itself an intelligible form. As we gaze at
this aerial view, a deep, male voice narrates a story of
haunting uncertainty, of an unplaceable object. The narrator
urges an unseen protagonist (someone of an unknown age,
but small enough that he must be lifted to look into a cup-
board, yet who smokes) to reassess all other objects around
him, leading into the beauty of disintegration, into the unsettling
sensations of its dramatized and intensified
patterns of experience.
Rosa Barba
49