Rosa Barba remakes the world in the summer performance

Rosa Barba has a way to take away the most magical and basic elements of our world and then fold them on each other – break them apart and make them re-turned. She has been remastering films into sculptures and astronomy since the 1990s and is fascinated by how these things compete for time and space. In the latest exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, she raises her bets to turn the black box gallery into a cello. As the film projector pulls the celluloid’s drive panels apart, extending from the floor to the ceiling. Scotland Tape The tape that clamps these wires together pulls out the wires as they pass through the wires, making a bass, symphony.

The exhibition “One Man’s Pauses” is an unusual investigation into Baba’s work for 15 years: more than a dozen movie sculptures were displayed in one room and a room was arranged so that they almost become a work. The centerpiece of the show is Barba’s latest 25-minute movie, TOLL (2025), co-commissioned by MOMA and VEGA Foundation. The film is Shotat Cern, the world’s largest particle physics laboratory and will be screened at Moynihan Train Hall and Times Square, and throughout July, the work is part of the “Midnight” program.

On MOMA, the film is built on the gradual aspect of experimental music, which is gracefully complemented by mechanical clicks of various simulation devices used by Barba to make sculptures. TOLL Displays the sun and various reflective solar panels in the Mojave Desert through a telescope. Eventually, the screen was cut into white, illuminating the sculpture in Moma’s black box. Here, whether it is solar or artificial, light is strictly studied, and it will produce a miracle. During the period of smooth screens and black boxes, Baba’s mechanical tinting was refreshing and even urgent – ​​reminding us that we had agents taking things apart and putting them back in place.

You are committed to making simulation movies when it’s outdated. Obviously, it’s not just nostalgia. You mentioned in your conversation with Joan Jonas bomb You cannot use video to get the job done.

It’s never about nostalgia. Earlier, I started to shatter movie instruments, partly a way of opposing immersion, trying to leave audience alerts and activations, and in this way of intellectual shifting. Mechanics is important for this kind of work.

There are many other reasons. I immediately realized my first movie Panzano(1990), using a simulated film camera does define my work. It makes the process work great: you have to be very precise in dealing with the limitations of materials and time. In addition, the object of the film projector is very large in the room. Often, I work with non-actors and find that the huge image and loud sound of the film camera give people a clear way of understanding, which makes them change gears and become the ones they want to be in front of the camera. This is respectful to me and helped me solve some of the problems that come with photographers and voyeurism.

Even if I’m not photographing people, but landscapes, there is a kind of alchemy from holding the camera, which has a certain weight that requires me to use it all over my body. Questions like “How long can I last?” Start defining the length and time of certain scenarios. I responded more and more to various architectures, dismantling the cinematic elements until they became sculptures and attracted the importance of the machine.

Your work is thoroughly studied and is often accepted in science disciplines, but it is never taught. It obviously refuses to tell people what to think and accepts mystery and agnostic. Usually, it ends up being very elegant. What role does beauty play for you?

My work always involves searching for sublime in some way and exploring perceptions and how we view things, even if they are dangerous or catastrophic, like my movies Bending the Earth (2015), showing a uranium field. But there is always this sense of vulnerability: disaster and beauty are usually very relevant, and I am interested in going this line. I am also interested in the invariance of knowledge and what we want when we try to transcend knowledge and the way we want to portray ourselves.

It is often beauty and mystery that makes many people interested in studying things like astronomy. However, many scientific formats (such as illustrations) have this way of removing mysticism, and you keep the magic. You have long been interested in the space and time that astronomy and cinemas can collapse. In this exhibition, this almost becomes metadata, where you are crashing for about 15 years of work until it almost becomes a device. Where does this idea come from?

I’ve been working on creating ideas for meetings or conversations for some time. When I was invited to curate an exhibition of works from the Reina Sofía series in 2010, I showed a variety of works that were opened and closed at different times. Before that, I made an installation called “Instrument” at the 2009 Venice Biennale Coro Spezzato: The future lasts for one daywhere different projectors synchronize, the sounds will turn off and respond to each other. But this is in Neue Nationalgalerie [in Berlin] In 2021, I really stood out from this idea.

At MOMA, I want to focus on the sound works and sculpture works related to ideas in the main films, TOLL. When I learned about the space, I was attracted by its floor-to-ceiling windows. Whenever I use architecture, I look for kinds of membranes to bring inside and out. I did it on both sides of the space. If you look up or look down from the fifth floor on the ledge, the exhibition in and out. I want to understand this space as an experimental lab and conceptually deal with the idea of ​​light – from morning to evening, the space transforms into. The sculptures are more prominent in the early days of the day, but within a few hours the film becomes brighter. For which kind of work, no hierarchy is more dominant. I began to understand the entire space, and its height was incredible. I tested wires in the studio for a long time, but as the entire gallery became a cello body, I had to restore them to that space.

There are three and a half minutes in the movie, you will only hear the wire piece getting louder and louder, Scottish tape taking off the pizzicato. Scottish tape returns in the form of this prismatic circular sculpture, which is also based on early experiments about how to make our colors visible.

You have been combining film and sculpture, where the installation itself becomes time-based. Tell us more about the new movie.

Like all my films, I am interested in the portrayal of us as humans: how we want to go beyond, and we want to learn more about the universe. There are many things we don’t know. I want to explore this vein light, continue my work on the overlap of astronomy and film, and further develop it to the physics laboratory. I have this relationship [as an artist-in-residence] Already have CERN; a few years ago, I photographed their cloud chambers and the light they generate. Then I learned about this incredible radio astronomy lab[Nançay Radio Observatory] In the middle of France, a piece of land was purchased in the 1950s without all kinds of harassment, so scientists could gather radio waves and gather knowledge. Light is used to convert it all into code: in the middle of the film, the lens moves at the speed of the earth and enhances the faint signs of radio waves. I am interested in the space around us and the many dimensions and levels of it.

I took some experiments, one by one, each introducing a different light source. The process is a bit alchemy: I’m shooting with a 16mm camera and engraved with light from the material. I was able to capture what was invisible with more standard digital recordings from experiments, which was very exciting.

Tell us about the performance.

I’ve been developing shutter systems for drum responses for 9 years: shutter responses to different frequencies. Recently, I started working with the choir because I was also interested in how everyone has different sizes of frequencies and how all of these different frequencies produce different types of cinemas. This is my first time working with a singer Alicia Hall Moran and a percussionist Chad Taylor. I’m on the cello. I played the cello with the movie projector, pressing the cello on the running movie, and at the same time, the wire pieces played.

You can watch Barba’s performances at MOMA from June 26-29.