From Source to Poem is an invitation to think about the spaces in which history and cultural production are preserved in order to be passed on to future generations. The 35mm film shifts the focus from artworks into archival storage: Shot at the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center of the Library of Congress in Culpeper, Virginia (NAVCC), and at an enormous solar power plant in the Mojave Desert in California, it juxtaposes images of cultural production from the the largest media archive worldwide with those of industrial production. The film exposes the preservation of cultural outputs, but also their digitization. The central element of both sites is light, reflected as a source of energy and as medium, transmitting stored memory into the future. Accompanied by a rhythmical study of sounds gleaned from the archive in Culpeper: interviews with field workers, native American poets, and other voices, the audio-visual narration uproots those places from their pragmatic circumstances in order to suspend them in an undetermined temporality.

(Text Rosa Barba Studio)