A large panel of interwoven strips of red-tinted celluloid hangs from the ceiling on a wire, gently spinning in such a way that light is refracted in different directions. Sometimes it’s a window, sometimes a shadow, sometimes reflective and sometimes transparent, always a kaleidoscopic lens. Titled Weavers, after the basketry craft that inspired its construction, this use of film as a material substance, rather than a medium of expression, manifests a rhetorical question posed to me by the artist Rosa Barba. “What happens,” she says, “when the image is taken out of the projection and the ‘information’ becomes the light itself?” 

This poetic turn of phrase is emblematic of how Barba moves through the world, investigating the slippery dichotomies between fact and fiction, science and spirituality, human-made and natural phenomena. Her research-based and yet highly abstracted approach to film as both material and medium enables her transfiguration of energy into matter and back again. In exploring such diverse subjects as astronomy and the mysteries of the universe, concrete poetry and the fungibility of language, Indigenous communities in the Andes and the spiritual repercussions of a warming climate, Barba blurs the boundaries between seemingly distinct categories that serve to orient our understanding of the world, and instead invites us to sit in a state of nuance and ambiguity.

“Poetry and subtlety have a renewed role, showing us an alternative for how language, time, and space might interact,” she says. “Communication today seems to be about compressing one sentence into a slogan or statement and making thoughts shorter, just like our habit of branding everything. I think things need to become real again—and poetry, being multifaceted, helps language to become more playful, so that we cannot immediately grasp it.”

Through what some might experience as obfuscation, Barba confronts the biases endemic to documentary film, the potential for affective or informational manipulation, and the narrative linearity that the medium enforces. Rather, her installations center the complex, and often modified, physical apparatuses of film projectors as sculptural forms. The work makes visible the mechanics, artifice, and failings of filmic technologies—embracing the flickering, ticking, and scratches of the projection that others might attempt to conceal.

In the presence of a machine whose function is one of both magic and measure, it seems only natural that Barba engages her subjects as both poet and scientist. Her investigations may not adhere to scientific processes of theory, experiment, and proof, but they do follow exploratory threads that lead her on any number of journeys, from the mountains of Peru to the colors of the cosmos. In each instance, she takes what you might call an Enlightenment-era approach to her subject, examining not only its material realities and social relations, but also its existential resonances—always pondering a larger-than-life meaning in the universe.