Rosa Barba - A Home For a Unique Individual

Rosa Barba’s project for MUSAC takes the Museum’s architecture and its characteristic interior mobility as a starting point to hold a complex dialogue with the cinematographic devices that the artist has been using in recent years and that are a distinctive element of her work. 

The space for this project is situated at the start of the museum’s itinerary, from where the rest of the halls can be visited. This introductory or preface-like aspect, as well as the fact that it is near to three of the five museum courtyards, provides this longitudinal space with a unique status within the general structure of the museum.

Barba has chosen to read the hall as a huge scenic space where the ‘performative’ devices could converge and interact with the different publics. A big backdrop/screen, running perpendicular to the longitudinal direction, will keep track of the entries and exits of people from this ‘set’. 

Film, image, light, projection machines and texts form a well-organised narrative on this big backdrop, but are also located in strategic points of the hall, creating different narrative and formal intensities and establishing its own tempo and action.

Using an overhead projector, a 35mm film is projected from one of the courtyards towards the crosswise screen, which, on the other side, receives the rest of the filmic elements in form of texts, sounds and other devices. 

As is the case in other pieces by Barba, there is an interest in dismantling the narration in different elements, such as text, sound or image, as a kind of oblique experiments on the relationships between word and image, in order to transform it all in an asynchronous space. 

The three surrounding courtyards play a fundamental role in this ‘piece’, either in the form of extensions of the scenic space or as backstage, but also, for instance, as a sonic extension of the scene that is playing out inside the hall. The viewers may also walk around these courtyards like true actors in this expanded ‘theatre production’. 

It is in this both cinematic and theatrical space —the museum— where a fiction based on the interaction between human landscapes and natural landscapes, or, in other words, on the traces and phenomenons that accumulate simultaneously over history, is going to take place.

Juan de Nieves