Rosa Barba
From Source to Poem, 2016

Artist
Rosa Barba

Title
From Source to Poem

Year of creation
2016

Technique and duration
35mm film, color, light sound, 12 min.

Year of acquisition
2020

The acquisition was made possible by Gabriele Quandt and Julia Stoschek

From Source to Poem highlights the preservation of cultural products, but also their digitization for the future. The 35mm film shifts the focus from artworks to their archiving. Filmed at the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center of the Library of Congress in Culpeper, Virginia and at a huge solar power plant in the Mojave Desert in California, images of cultural production from the largest media archive in the world are juxtaposed with those of industrial production. The central element of both places is light, as a source of energy and as a medium that transmits stored memories into the future. Accompanied by a poetic soundtrack with recordings from the Culpeper archive: interviews with field workers, indigenous authors and other voices, From Source to Poem the pragmatic circumstances of the filmed places by subjecting them to an indeterminate temporality.

(Text Rosa Barba Studio)