From Medium to Material: Reframing Film with Rosa Barba and David Joselit

David Joselit:
I wanted to start with the really interestingly titled Aggregate States of Matters from 2019, which is on view at MoMA on the second floor. The film is based on your engagement with Quechua communities in Peru, in the Andes, and particularly focuses around the question of melting glaciers there and how it's impacted traditional lifestyles. But that description doesn't really give a very accurate sense of the film because, like all of your work, it doesn't conform to either a documentary or a fictional model. There are many different attitudes and perspectives in the work. There seems to be vintage film segments as well as segments by you. There are different film stocks used and very different points of view, from aerial to direct face to face, almost a documentary rhetoric of filmmaking. On the one hand, there is a natural ecology, the idea that this landscape that we're seeing is being drastically, catastrophically changed through the melting of the glacier, and an informational or representational ecology of images.

Rosa Barba:
Aggregate States of Matters is a film that I worked on several years after I visited Peru for one of my first exhibitions anywhere. I was struck by the way nature and the people were really one thing there, belonging together. It stayed with me for all the films that came after. I went back to make this film because I was very much affected or engaged with the idea of the archives that we leave as a society—the Inca drawings that we cannot decipher anymore—and how this becomes a new language, like poetry or science, and we try to understand it. In the same way, later I made many films in the American desert, also about how we leave these modern archives—in one film [Bending to Earth, 2015], in the landscape with uranium fields, or in The Long Road (2010), an abandoned race track. 

Working with film came out of working with photography first, but soon I felt that there is this quality to working with celluloid that has something very performative to it. You have to be fast in deciding [a shot], and when you will use up the material, and when you have the time to change the roll, and how long you can hold the camera, and all of these things.

When you engage with people, like in Aggregate States of Matters, [the process] gave them a chance to understand that they are being filmed because the camera made noise, and it was something that I couldn't hide. So that gave me a good stage to start with, a respectful stage where we can engage with each other. 

And with climate change as a subject—early on, I didn't call it climate change, back when I started to make one of my very first films, Outwardly from Earth’s Center (2007), which is about an island that is drifting. These subjects were always there. For this film, I was reading about the melting of the glaciers in Peru, since it has the second largest desert city but also a huge amount of glaciers, and the largest communities left of indigenous people, the Quechua. I felt there is something to learn here. 

Aerial footage is also something I am often very interested in because it gives this [sense of] timelessness, it’s this view where you don't understand scale anymore and you lose the idea of time. This is a space where we can rethink a situation because we have no references. I'm always trying, through filmmaking, to reach this hybrid space. 

Rosa Barba:
Thank you for this beautiful observation. I had access [to the community] through an anthropologist that I met and interviewed, and then I met this woman that is in the film, Rosario, who invited me to be part of one of these rituals for the glaciers, which happen once a year. They have transformed this ritual because of the melting of the glacier—before they would take a piece of the glacier and bring it down into the village and the ceremony would take place there and now they don't touch it and no piece can be removed. So they do this other ceremony up there—I didn't see exactly what happens, I was just part of how it was prepared, which I filmed, and later I stayed in the distance. I was following the lead of Rosario. And there were a lot of interviews that I recorded, so a lot of sound recordings, and later I was thinking how to work with this knowledge—it was translated and I decided to use it as a visual information as well. The film is a loop, so each time, you might read something else or continue reading. I'm very interested in this kind of nonlinear reading and viewing. And I think the loop helps me to go into layers of time and language without having to say it all in one go.

David Joselit:
For those of you who maybe haven't seen the film, what Rosa is referring to in terms of the nonlinear reading is that there's a transcription of the text and a translation of it as well into English, that appears on the screen as a block, a grid of lines—which is impossible to read—and then there's a soundtrack that feels, not cacophonous, but it's many layers of voices together. And this also seems to me one of those dimensions of the distance in proximity. On the one hand, we're allowed into a scenario that would be difficult to access in another way. And yet your refusal to root it to a specific reading comes up through this really extraordinary use of language. It is somewhat upsetting, right? Because when you see language, your impulse is that you should read it and understand it, but once you relax, you can pick out phrases from it. And somehow that feels illuminating, despite the fact that you know that most of the information isn’t going to really be accessible to you as a viewer.

Rosa Barba:
Everything's disappearing, the glaciers are disappearing, the [indigenous] language, their knowledge is disappearing. And they were not really used to speaking about it. For them, it’s very intuitive how they use what they know. So I felt it shouldn't become a manifesto or something.

David Joselit:
There's a second film at MoMA on the fourth floor called Charge from this year—it's a new work. One of the impressions of your work that I find really interesting but also challenging as a viewer is that we have to figure out a way of entering because you're not giving us a script. In Charge (2025), there are many different uses of light. You were telling me the other day that you've collaborated with a physicist in your teaching, and I think that experience contributed to this film as well. What is particularly interesting is how light becomes a scientific document. Light is something that is read as data—light is a scientific effect, an optical effect, a perceptual effect, and it's also a communication medium. And your film presents this field of light that somehow the viewer needs to enter into. It's almost like we have to learn how to see your film in a certain kind of way. And yet it's quite pleasurable. You can also just decide this is a very effective, beautifully created light show to some degree. When you see it in MoMA, especially on a Friday, which is the day I was there, there are huge crowds, there is a kind of festivity to the work as well, which is quite exciting. People performing against the light screens and things like that.

Rosa Barba:
It also connects to how we use the camera in the first place to make a film, but then also how the projection mechanisms are part of the viewing. And finally, how we can modify the projection system to see what other images can be made with it. Or using the film material as a sound instrument. There are two moments in the exhibition: one is when the film is playing, which is 25 minutes long, and connects to the sculptural works [in the show], but then there is the moment when the film ends and white light is projected, and the sculptural pieces that activate sound are audible. It is a bit like choreography, it’s 12 different pieces. 

I'm very interested in working with architecture as well. I have a large screen which is an amazing part of the space and this can become a sort of membrane as well that lets light in and lets light out. On the fifth floor, I wanted to keep this transparency, so the whole exhibition space is a sort of laboratory—it becomes one physics experiment of light. I worked with Dr. Puneet Anantha Murthy, who is a photon physicist, on some experiments together at ETH Zürich. I could build experiments up in different ways, use projectors, film on a 16-millimeter high-speed camera, and suddenly other things became visible because the film material reacts differently. That is all part of Charge.

David Joselit:
As you've already alluded, the exhibition is full of sculptural works, and one of the things that I think you're well known for is using the apparatus of film in ways that weren't necessarily intended initially in the design of the machine. Film exits from the projector, moves outside of it, comes back into it, and sometimes a typewriter will imprint upon it. The wire pieces are really quite extraordinary works. The celluloid leaves the projector, is fed along a wire, which is like an instrument string, so it has a resonance, and is often way up in the ceiling, so it’s an exuberant, extravagant gesture in some ways. There is a sound, like a string instrument to some degree. The film loops around the wires, but then the projection table illuminates the celluloid on the wall. There were many people, when I was in the space, performing in the projector beam—which was great because it was also a sort of proto-film. The celluloid created a line and the wire created a line that was sonorous—a sound line—but then people were creating their own films against the wall that the actual celluloid was interrupting or structuring. It was “expanded cinema” in quite a different way from how Gene Youngblood described it in 1970. Can you say something either about the sculptures or how you began to explode the apparatus of film in these extraordinary ways?

Rosa Barba:
I started at some point very early on to fragment cinema and the different elements that make cinema. With a film like Aggregate States of Matters, I work with all these different elements—like language, image, sound—and I bring them together again in the editing. But in the sculptures, I’m working sometimes with just one element. In an early work from 2009, One Way Out, the film gets sucked into a ventilation tube and there is a ventilator holding the film up only by air—there is no visual information on the film, but there's a sound information, so the optical sound gets bumped up in the tube and it becomes a loudspeaker as well. One of the newer works has this idea of projecting light onto the performative element and we see this again as a shadow projection on the wall. This is something I've been experimenting with, the idea that film becomes a performative act and the audience also sometimes interacts with it.

David Joselit:
And of course you have done and will do more performances in the space as well. Do you want to say something about this dimension of the exhibition?

Rosa Barba:
There will be 10 performances with Chad Taylor, who is an incredible drummer and percussionist that I've been working with for nearly 10 years. I developed these shutter systems that are part of the performance. We started experimenting with Chad Taylor's percussions, and the different frequencies of the hi-hat cymbals and the bass drum and so on trigger different shutter systems that are in front of the film projectors. So the sound is making the cinema. I worked with vocalists in Berlin during the pandemic, with a choir, where the different frequencies of the voices were reacting with the shutter systems—everybody has a different frequency so everyone could produce a different form of cinema. At MoMA, I'm collaborating with [mezzo-soprano and composer] Alicia Hall Moran and Chad Taylor and I will be on the cello. We rearranged the music together over several dates.

David Joselit:
It makes me think about how percussive the projector is, the sound of the projector. It’s amazing how you elaborate these different dimensions of film and allow them to be together instead of separating them out, but in a configuration that's completely different from the norm. 

I also want us to talk a little bit about your interest in concrete poetry and use of language. The piece at MoMA has texts on the celluloid. It almost makes you feel dizzy because the text is moving in two different directions and it's a completely different way of reading—it’s almost four-dimensional. Making film into a literary substrate in a different kind of way really is very evocative.

Rosa Barba:
The piece that is exhibited at Vistamare [at Independent] is an idea of hopscotch. I was looking at different children’s hopscotch games and drew one that brought them together—there is always this recurring form that all the different cultures had. Since the film is woven together vertically and horizontally, and it's transparent, it goes around the frame. It sometimes comes together for a second and you have the full picture and then it breaks apart again. And that's happening also in the piece at MoMA, with Composition in Field (2022), which is an extract of a Charles Olson manifesto, Projective Verse, where of course I liked the double title of this mental projection and the projection itself. The piece becomes a sort of poetry machine, where a new poem is constantly generated.

David Joselit:
It’s an amazing work and I think it was nice to see it at MoMA in the same space as Spacelength Thought, which is the work where the celluloid is fed through a typewriter and a single letter is typed and then the letter is projected, then the film is just expelled onto the floor. Can you say something about that work?

Rosa Barba:
It’s a typewriter that sits on the 16-millimeter projector, and I wrote a text that is about this nonlinearity of reading and slowing down of language. In a lot of these language-based works, I'm interested in the idea that, more and more, we have to express ourselves in short sentences, and if you explode language and reconfigure it, what would come out of that. The text is typed onto the celluloid letter by letter and only one letter is projected at a time. And the letter, because the ink is typed on a plastic material, dissolves slightly but it's still recognizable as a letter. Then the whole text falls on the floor and could be read as a pile on the floor.