The Brooklyn Rail

The Italian-born and Berlin-based artist Rosa Barba makes work that investigates the conceptual and material qualities of film in idiosyncratic ways. Since her coming of age in the early 2000s, she has focused on analog film both as a filmmaker and an installation artist, injecting cinematic language with a distinctive experimental inquiry into spatiality and multiple temporal dimensions.

As though “dissecting” film in its fundamental physical components—the projector, the celluloid, the screen—Barba rescues them from the invisibility to which the traditional black-box experience has confined them, and turns them into sculptural objects that activate space in carefully crafted installations of varying scale. Guided by the same deconstructing and recomposing strategy in her films, sculptural objects, and installations, she explores the quintessential elements of film as language—light, sound, and image—to new ends. In so doing, Barba has developed a singular body of work that probes composition and plasticity to invite new attitudes toward looking both at the filmic medium and at the world we live in. While highly focused, her art thrives on a sense of infinite possibility, and as such it feels not only timely, but necessary in the face of the current troubled climate marked by political, cultural, and social turmoil.

What follows is an edited version of an interview with Barba conducted on April 17, 2025, over Zoom, as she took a pause from her work in New York preparing the installation of her solo show The Ocean of One’s Pause at MoMA, organized by Stuart Comer, the museum’s Lonti Ebers Chief Curator of Media and Performance. In our conversation, the artist reflects on time, space, inscriptions, the flickering moment of film, sound, science, poetry, the invisible, collaboration, and anarchism.  

Francesca Pietropaolo (Rail): You work primarily as a filmmaker and a sculptor. But these definitions don’t quite pin down the rich complexity of your practice, which can be described as an exploration of the hybrid space that opens up in-between mediums: film (in its analog form), sculpture (both still and kinetic), language, sound, and performance. This dimension of “in-betweenness” is made palpable in the subtly mesmerizing, multi-layered installations that you make, which have become more and more articulated in the interrelations of their constitutive elements. Carefully staging in space a mutable intersection of mediums, your installations transform the experience of the architecture in which they are presented, inviting viewers to step into a multi-sensory journey where image, text, object, light, and sound intermingle, overlap, and collide. Presently, you are preparing your first solo exhibition at MoMA, The Ocean of One’s Pause, organized by Stuart Comer, which opens in about two weeks. Its title seems to beautifully announce a web of spatial and temporal dimensions, suggesting the spaciousness of time as infinite expanse the moment linear time is suspended or “in pause.” The presentation will transform the Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Studio on the fourth floor into a site-specific installation encompassing film, kinetic sculpture, language, sound, and performance, and spanning fifteen years of your output. It is a major opportunity to present your work in-depth to a wider public in the US, since your show at MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, ten years ago. Can you tell me how the current project came to be? 

Barba: Stuart has been following my work since early on, in the 2000s. At the time, he was Curator of Film at Tate Modern. We have continued to develop our dialogue and, a few years ago, he proposed that we present my work in the Kravis Studio. It is very exciting for me, especially because I am able to present several new works together with earlier ones. 

Rail: Among the new works is the film Charge (2025), co-commissioned by MoMA and the Vega Foundation, Toronto, which investigates light, building on your long-term interest in the dialogue between art and science. It is presented as a large-scale projection at the core of the installation.

Barba: The show includes this new film, two new sculptural pieces, and other works from 2009 and 2012. Old and new pieces interweave to open up unexpected resonances and correspondences among them.

Rail: You have previously orchestrated presentations interconnecting existing and new works—notably in the exhibition In a Perpetual Now at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin in 2021—but here you seem to have pushed further that cross-temporal and cross-spatial dimension by adding yet another layer through a program of live performances. Can you talk about that?

Barba: For the MoMA show, I conceived a series of performances, all new commissions, that will further animate the installation. They are grounded in performances I did with the percussionist Chad Taylor in the past. To explore the relationship between the sonic and the visual, I developed a shutter system that reacts to special frequencies of sound. At the beginning of our collaboration, I asked Chad to be on the drum kit, then later on at Park Avenue Armory, where I presented In a Perpetual Now of Instantaneous Visibility in 2019, I joined Chad in the performance with my cello: it was the two of us and the film projection. At MoMA, I have decided to add the voice of Alicia Hall Moran, who will perform in a speech/singing form. Her voice becomes another instrument that, by way of its sound frequencies, triggers the film. In her performance, there is much more language involved compared to previous performance elements in my work. That’s a new thing for me. This novel aspect ties performance more closely to my work in film and sculpture where, in general, language is a central concern. In my films, language as text often becomes a visual layer embedded in the moving image. In some of my sculptures it takes up a bodily presence.

Rail: That’s the case with both your static and your kinetic sculpture.

Barba: At MoMA I show two language-based sculptural pieces, both kinetic: Spacelength Thought (2012), in which a typewriter sits on a 16 mm projector and types a monologue on blank film, which the projector projects on the wall, one letter at a time; and a more recent work called Composition in Field (2022). The latter is based on Charles Olson’s essay “Projective Verse” (1950) which is a manifesto about poetry and about how a poem can be made and activated. I use a fragment from Olson’s text in my work. I was very intrigued by the title of his essay. Inspired by it, I took the notion of projective verse in its double meaning as both inferring a mental explanation and a straightforward projection.

Rail: Olson proposes poetry as a form of “open field” that “projects” organically from the poem’s content, in a sort of energy transfer to the reader. His idea that human breath conveys a poet’s vital energy and should be the measure of a poetic line is also very interesting. He refers to “the breathing of the man who writes as well as of his listenings.” In your work, text becomes image, but also infers a bodily dimension.

Barba: Absolutely. In Composition in Field, a certain mechanism is at play: two text layers are woven with each other, as a vertical film strip and a horizontal film strip bearing text move under your eye. They are both lit from behind in a light box. That adds yet another visual layer. The letters produce a continuously changing script, which repeats in a loop evoking a cyclical time. The text is being constantly fragmented and edited together. By reading it, one composes the text as it is being projected. I think that the performances using text will play with these language-based works in an interesting way.

Rail: The minimalist visual quality of Composition in Field, with its underlying gridded structure emphasizing deconstruction and reconstruction, calls to mind Piet Mondrian’s compositions. Moreover, words are also woven around a metallic frame that defines the “field”—the field of vision—suggesting that energy may break out of that frame any moment and that poetry may expand into our everyday world. It is also interesting how no individual reading and editing of the text is ever going to be the same. Thus reading defies the desire to attain one definite meaning. Also in your films, where you probe the fine line between reality and fiction, the plural nature of meaning is emphasized. Your work seems to evoke the dictum attributed to Allen Ginsberg: “I don’t think there is any truth. There are only points of view.”

Barba: The instability of language interests me. There are multiple possibilities of meaning.

Rail: Can you talk more in detail about the performance element in the show?

Barba: There are ten dates for them throughout the run of the exhibition, from mid-May to the end of June. The performances by Chad Taylor and Alicia Hall Moran, as well as mine playing the cello, will further activate the installation by way of their produced sound frequencies. This also entails bringing other films to the existing exhibition.

Rail: Do you mean that more film projections will be activated, with images responding to the sonic frequencies of the performances?

Barba: Yes.

Rail: So you’re envisioning something closer to a living space, akin to an organism that by addition grows and changes over time. The visitor’s experience won’t be the same at the beginning of the show and during its run, until its ending. A temporal process adds up to the spatial layout conceived at the outset.

Barba: That is underscored also by the play with daylight that the exhibition allows. Incorporating the changes occurring over time in the natural light that comes through the gallery’s large glass window, the installation emphasizes the presence of light as an almost living element. Light produces an ever-changing experience.

Rail: You said you are involved in performing music. Does your performance include spoken words as well?

Barba: Very little. At some point, I respond to the text of the performance, but mostly it is Chad and Alicia performing with the spoken text, while respectively playing music and singing.

Rail: Do you allow room for improvisation within the structure of the performance?

Barba: There is a text and there is a script to begin with, but we have arranged the performances collaboratively: we had several performance dates in New York where MoMA rented a sound recording studio for us. So we have actively worked with that scripted material. There is a structure, since there is a very important spatial component that determines what happens with the projections within the installation, but there will also be space for improvisation.

Rail: How did you respond to the unique architectural quality of the gallery space with its spatial configuration? The Kravis Studio has a large glass window, as you pointed out earlier. That allows for a close dialogue with the city outside and life going on busily in the urban fabric.

Barba: I am always very interested in working with architecture—responding to the qualities of the exhibition space. Here, this large window is really great, particularly because I am interested in exploring a membrane in the body of the architecture that allows the spilling of the exhibition to the outside. I am interested in how there is a fragility in the inside-outside relationship. So here I responded to that quite a lot. The film Charge will be projected onto the window screen, and there is also a lot of space around the screen where the city comes in and sort of frames the film.

Moreover, on the opposite side of the exhibition space, there is a transparency in relation to the suite of galleries on the same floor—the artworks on view there and their visitors. In that, the Kravis Studio is a space where light spills in and out from both sides. Another component of the exhibition is the kinetic sculpture Wirepiece (2022/2025), comprising drum, guitar and cello strings and a strip of film stock looped in a modified projector. Moving continuously against the wires, which are held tight between floor and ceiling, the film strip produces a delicate sound. It is akin to a site-specific string instrument, where the Kravis Studio becomes the instrumental body of the piece.

Rail: Do you feel that there are elements in this project that have invited you to push further your thinking and your art making, in some respect?

Barba: For sure. The specificity of the space invited me to experiment further. I had done a similarly complex exhibition at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, as you pointed out earlier, but in that case there was a parcours with many different sculptural works and films presented in a sort of choreography. At MoMA, the exhibition can be seen as one work. I like a lot the spilling out that the installation produces at MoMA. It also has a lot to do with the new film that I made, which takes its cues from a physics experiment to explore light. I filmed different light experiments, and I also researched sites in radio astronomy fields where space is investigated through light and sound. Moreover, performance truly becomes an added layer of space at MoMA: it emerges as a mechanism of its own within the larger mechanism of the installation. All this has opened up a new way of thinking about the work and about exhibition-making too.

Rail: How about the specificity of the museum context, MoMA being the citadel of modernism? You have touched on your engagement with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s architecture in the case of the Neue Nationalgalerie (refurbished by David Chipperfield). There you had a modernist architecture to play with; here, there is the possibility of entering into dialogue with the rich history of the museum as a champion of modernity and with its collection of modern and contemporary art. From where your show is, on the fourth floor, there are different points of view onto the collection galleries, as you evoked earlier. Your work often tackles questions of modernity, memory, and history, so I’m curious to know how MoMA’s context has inspired you.

Barba: I always think about archives—particularly modern archives—and about how archives are constantly written and rewritten, added on. MoMA is a great space to reflect on that. Also, my films are traversed by a concern with landscape inscriptions, and much in the same way, I am thinking now about inscriptions in the museum. I think about the works that have been on display there before my solo show goes up. The Kravis Studio has showcased many presentations since its inauguration in 2019. In particular, I will never forget the first one, David Tudor and Composers Inside Electronics Inc., among many others. Somehow the memories of those “stories”—of previous art shows—nurture my thinking, even as I focus now on putting up my own exhibition at the museum. At a certain level, for me, those past exhibitions remain inscribed in the space, and it is like continuing a conversation with them.

Rail: Your art investigates nature as landscape as well as the field of invisible forces at play at the level of matter: invisible elements which are the subject of science. You are also concerned with the nature of the universe. Can you touch on the dialogue between astronomy and cinema that often animates your work, and speak in particular of Charge, which stems out of your residency at CERN (The European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Geneva?

Barba: Charge comes out precisely from my previous research and work exploring the overlaps of astronomy and cinema. I started to intensely delve into that aspect around ten years ago, when I did a collaboration with the Hirsch Observatory at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. Out of a residency there, I made the film Color Out of Space (2015), which incorporates images of stars and planets collected over the previous year at the Observatory. Later, in 2018, I made Drawn by the Pulse, a kinetic sculpture employing 35 mm celluloid which addresses the discovery of Cepheids and the flicker of the stars by the American astronomer Henrietta S. Leavitt (1868–1921), who worked at the Harvard College Observatory as part of a group of amazing women astronomers active at the turn of the twentieth century. They researched into the properties of the stars processing astronomical data and analyzing the photographic plates produced by Harvard’s telescopes. They were known as the “Harvard computers.” I started to think that stars actually work like an analog film projector, which creates “illuminations” under our eye. After all, there is an affinity between the flickering star and the flickering film.

Later on, I was invited to do a residency at CERN, as part of their art program. In addition to filming Charge, I am also developing a work in collaboration with them for their space dedicated to art and to visitor experience, which has been newly designed by Renzo Piano. So I made visits and had several encounters with scientists at CERN. I wanted to explore further how art and science can meet. I wanted to investigate new possibilities, and maybe open up another door.

Rail: Currently, you also teach at the Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, developing collaborations with scientists within that setting. How is that experience?

Barba: The ETH offers me a very stimulating environment to advance my research. There I have teamed up with the physicist Dr. Puneet Anantha Murthy. Since last year, we have been teaching together a course called “Understanding Light.” We are just being very curious with each other’s fields. We are exploring the intersections between art and science with a small group of students from physics, art, and architecture. In some ways, the course is like a lab. Charge is also a sort of investigation into new possibilities—into how to push certain experiments further using a very experimental film practice. It is as though I have expanded the lab research offered to me by the interdisciplinary collaboration at the university through this experimental film perspective, employing light, exposure, and inscription in a different way in the realm of my artistic practice.

Rail: Usually you shoot your films with a handheld camera. With it, sometimes you film from a helicopter capturing evocative aerial views—often in long shots. You have described your camera as a tool that allows you to draw in space. Is that still the case with the new film? 

Barba: Yes, Charge was filmed with my 16 mm handheld camera. But, given the large scale of the project, I have also used another camera—a high-speed 16 mm. As always, it is all shot in analog.

Rail: You approach analog film pointing at its inherent fragility, but without invoking nostalgia for what is an outdated technology (especially vis-à-vis digital film). You seem to have rather a matter-of-fact approach to the specificity of the medium at hand, so to speak.

Barba: Analog film has been my tool since the beginning, following an initial interest in photography very early on. For me, it is a specific medium with particular characteristics to exploit. For instance, that “illumination” moment that I am interested in—in which I see an affinity with the flickering star—is something that only an analog projector can get.

Rail: You reference analog film also as a space for archive—technically, it lasts longer than digital media in that respect. In the face of our digital age and its dominant inclination to fast image consumption, your work invites slowness and attentiveness on the part of the viewer and a bodily kind of experience. To that end, you often use the double projection screen so that viewers may “edit” the film in their own way as they look and move around the screen. Furthermore, wandering through your installations is an experience of dislocation and uncertainty. I am curious to know how you might see the ongoing development of your work, with its rumination on the archive and knowledge, in relation to the increasingly pervasive dissemination of AI, which is transforming in particular how images are made, looked at, and interpreted.

In April, I attended a thought-provoking lecture, “Mapping AI: How to See Planetary-Scale Artificial Intelligence,” by the AI scholar and artist Kate Crawford organized by the American Academy in Rome. Her work as an artist tackles the nature of AI, critiquing the environmental, social, political, and cultural impact of its industry. (Incidentally, Crawford’s work is featured in the group show The World Through AI, currently at Jeu de Paume in Paris through September, and it will be part of the Venice Biennale of Architecture opening in May.) In particular, as a scholar Crawford focuses on the planetary scale of data archives that constitute AI’s content and investigates how that scale—which privileges quantity over quality—generally reflects a discriminatory approach in terms of issues of identity and representation, and how all this may transform the very notion of knowledge. Are these issues that interest you and, if so, do you see these questions as perhaps playing into your thinking as an artist going forward?

Barba: I think that my work counters the dimension brought forward by AI, even if it doesn’t address it directly. The cinematic spaces that I convene invite a more complex process of construction of knowledge. In my book On the Anarchic Organization of Cinematic Spaces (2021), I draw attention to the idea of flicker, and I think through it taking it as a kind of non-algorithmic thing, which is why it is so unexpected. There is this lack of information that is embedded in the way you look. There is always this little moment of non-information and invisibility which counters how digital images or artificial intelligence work. I am interested in how this darkness of non-information gives us the freedom to think for ourselves and opens up this little mental space where, as you embark yourself in my film-based installations, you can decide which perspective to take on—how you read and how you look. This is in a way also a response to the AI age.

At MoMA, on view on the second floor is one of my long, research-based films, Aggregate States of Matters (2019). It will nicely overlap with my exhibition. Before you enter the gallery where this 35 mm film is presented, you find a “sculptural drawing” of mine from 2021, Uncertain Theme – and Therefore Abstract: a kinetic sculpture that uses celluloid film in a loop, which is now part of MoMA’s collection together with Aggregate States of Matters. I make large film projects like that every few years. In those cases, I conduct research in archives, I interview local communities, and spend periods of time with the inhabitants of the place where I want to film. Aggregate States of Matters was shot in Peru, where the landscape is made of contrasts, of climate extremes: there is the desert, but there are also glaciers. There, I spent time with the native Quechuan population whose life is being affected by the melting of a glacier due to climate change. I participated in one of their new rituals making an offering to the glacier, a sign of the transformation that their belief system is undergoing as it continues to adapt to nature. Going back to your question on AI, it is possible that I will be doing these longer films more, and that the idea of archives will change going forward, as I may respond to the dominance of AI in some further way.

Rail: Aggregate States of Matters is emblematic of your research-based film process. To a certain extent, your practice makes me think of the role of the artist as akin to that of the anthropologist or archeologist; though, a “paradoxical” anthropologist of the future: a figure who not only uncovers traces of the past in the landscape, but reinterprets them with the power of the imagination, suggesting a blend of time past, time present, and time future. Interestingly, you often contemplate how our contemporary society is leaving traces for the future. Can you tell me more about this notion of the trace or inscription in the landscape?

Barba: It’s very interesting what you say about the artist being a sort of anthropologist. It makes me think that through a research-based practice, the artist could be one of the few people in our future society to employ an anti-AI approach by invoking the power of a very subjective view onto something.

I started exploring the inscriptions in the landscape intuitively, when I filmed the first works in the American desert—notably The Long Road (2010) and Time as Perspective (2012). I continued to do so with my film Bending to Earth (2015). Then I understood more and more how we are looking into a modernist archive that is not fixed as an archive yet, and that building this sort of archive is something that we do sometimes unintentionally, but taking over space in the landscape, often hurting the environment. The environmental concern—linked to a critical look at the industrial exploitation of natural resources—has been part of my work since the very beginning. In 2007, I made the film Outwardly from Earth’s Center, which encapsulates that enduring preoccupation. I often explore human desires that are translated as “inscriptions” in the landscape, almost like archival notes—notably, the desire of modernity, of endless progress. I uncover how desires are often unfulfilled, or may change and move on to the next space, so to speak. To shoot Charge, I have returned to a location where I filmed before, but this time I chose a higher position to film from. It is the area of a solar power facility in the Mojave desert in the Southwestern United States. This complex will be closed in 2026, so it is already an archive in some way, one at the scale of a city, which is mind-blowing.

Rail: In rescuing these archival notes from oblivion, your work produces a blend of experimental documentary and fictional narrative. In the process, it opens up new thinking spaces. To me, this connects also to the notion of anarchism of which you spoke earlier. Through your work, it is as though we are invited to be free of dominant thinking categories that too often are imposed on us without our critical awareness of that happening. 

Barba: Yes, there is a self-organized space, in some way, especially in my installations, but it is one that allows freedom within it. There is a form of spatiality that is given over to the viewer’s experience. Within that set frame, there is a lot of openness.

Rail: You have collaborated with artists, composers, and musicians since very early on—for instance, with artists David Maljkovic and Barbara Hammer and the composer Jan St. Werner, among others. How does collaboration play in your process?

Barba: Working with film, there is a lot of collaboration taking place. You have your vision for a work, but as soon as others come in with their expertise there is another space that opens up for exchange, sharing, and negotiation in the making of the piece. I like that a lot. I particularly like the experience of going into a space with this group of people to film on site: it creates a sense of commitment, on a collective level. With performance, collaboration becomes more and more important to me. For the show at MoMA, with Chad and Alicia, we have been really developing this arrangement together. I proposed to them a scripted text, but I said, “This is not set in stone. If you feel that you can’t say that, or you want to say it differently, take that up.” So there is a script, but you can also let it go and come back to it. That happens in the space that you share with others. It is a beautiful experience.

Rail: Sound is very important in your work. One hears the working sound of the projector, the sound the celluloid makes as it continuously turns in a loop inside a light box. In your films, field recordings often meet with composed music. Venturing in the space of the city, in 2013 in Paris you also made a sound art piece, Fosse d’Orchestre [Orchestra Pit], installed at Canal de St. Martin, in which underwater speakers project sound on the water surface transforming it into a sensitive membrane. 

Barba: I experiment with sonic space at different levels. For my films, there have always been many people involved in my soundtracks. In particular, Jan St. Werner has often made compositional arrangements for them. Now more and more, I work with sound in such a way that it comes out of the fragmented elements of the film shooting. Now the soundtrack is very much built on field recording from the sites: my previous films also featured a lot of those recordings, but in Charge they are much more present. For instance, I filmed in this astrophysics field where there is a moving lens that projects radio waves and that is the core sound for the whole film. I sent these sound recordings to Chad and I asked him if he could drum to them. With Ellison Glenn, who arranged the sound for Charge, we used some of these drum sounds again and blended them with different other elements, such as electricity data that I recorded and so on. That is a new approach for me, which I am very interested in continuing to explore. Rather than thinking about soundtrack more, I am getting interested in finding information that is invisible and creating this close dialogue between what we see and what we hear to complement what we see.

Rail: You play music yourself. When did you start?

Barba: I have been making music since I was around eight years old. I started with the flute, and then I played the guitar for many years. After that, I started playing the cello, which was always my dream, but I wouldn’t say I am a cello player, in the sense that I started studying the instrument late, and so I feel that I didn’t have the necessary time to focus and learn really well. In Charge, I play the cello in an experimental way, more in terms of making sound.

Rail: You were born in Sicily and moved early on with your family to Germany, where you currently live. You have made several films in Italy. I wonder if your being Italian nurtures the way in which you look at landscape as a layered reality—one of multiple, enigmatic strata. The Italian landscape conveys a conflation of heritage, memory, presentness, and future.

Barba: Yes, there are all these different landscapes in Italy—natural, cultural, political, and social—and so you have all these different visualities in which you move in and of which you move out. I have been looking at landscape also in motion, traveling from Germany, where I live, to Sicily, where I am from. I have looked at what it means to live on an island, as well. These are elements that come very much into my work. My very first film, Panzano (2000) was shot in Tuscany. In it, I tried to formulate for the first time my ideas and perspectives through the camera. I felt it was easier for me to do that in Italy, since it is a space that I feel I belong to and yet, at the same time, I have an observer’s position in relation to it, almost like a foreigner’s look, because I am not there all the time. That dimension gave me the perfect platform to start thinking about filmmaking and developing my methodology based on the engagement with local inhabitants.

Rail:  You have spoken of that moment of transformation that takes place in the flickering light of the projected image. It seems to hold the promise of a transformative future. Do you still search for utopia today, as you make your art?

Barba: Yes, as human beings we are animated by the desire for a better future. I don’t want to let that hope go. I do believe that there are ways through which things can be turned around, transformed. If one just takes a different perspective, new ideas can spark, and with them a new sense of energy, of possibility.