The backs of projection screens, bikes belonging to the supervisory staff, tangled cables, dirty crockery, computer monitors, visitors\' shadows occasionally flitting over the screens: the camera lens of Sicilian-born Rosa Barba explores the backstage area of Expo 2000 for the music clip »Kontra« by the Cologne electronic formation Microstoria (consisting of Jan Werner from Mouse on Mars and Markus Popp/Oval). The clip focuses on the »uninteresting« spaces that do not appear in TV reports or promotion jingles, that no visitor looks for in the gigantic, belly-like pavilions at a squeaky-clean multimedia event. Rosa Barba has projected the sequences onto models, refilmed them, then transformed and intertwined them using digital processes. »With ›Kontra,‹ I tried to translate into a visual world the kind of brittleness that the band distils from analogue and digital sound. To achieve this, I looked for the ›hinterworld‹ of Expo 2000. « The poetic montage is used to create a surreal hi-tech backdrop that seems to dance weightlessly, somnambulistically, through the frame. »I try to create situations in which things that are not perfect, that don\'t fit in, can be seen in a new light,« says Barba.

Being contradictory, projecting counter-worlds, questioning perfection - the music videos of this 29-year-old artist, who now lives in Cologne, accomplish all this in an exemplary fashion. For example, »Distroia« (co-director Herwig Weiser), made for the duo Mouse on Mars, presents a calculated visual antithesis to the often abstract coolness of minimal electronic clips. The musicians Jan Werner and Andi Thoma appear in »Distroia« - trashy and informed by a brutal lo-tech aesthetic - as floppy silicon dolls that are hounded over fitness equipment to the accompaniment of hectic beats. For Mouse on Mars, Rosa Barba also made the video »Disk Dusk,« in which demonstrators in clubbing outfits make their way through a meadow landscape, holding up signs with mysterious symbols on them. This may be an ironic look at love-parade culture, with people lolling about in a white bubble of fabric at the end. However, it is not done farcically, but as a »fake documentary« with unobtrusive humour.

Besides collaborations connected with the Cologne electronica label sonig - such as the production of live visuals for Mouse on Mars concerts -, Rosa Barba also creates 35mm and 16mm film installations, in which she explores variations on her subjective concept of »expanded cinema.« What interests her, she says, is transforming cinema into other (public) spaces such as studios, galleries, museums, etc., as well as blending other visual art forms with cinema. In her project »Gegenlaufsequenzer« (»Drift On Off«), which was on display last winter in the Medienturm (http://www.medienturm.at) in Graz and in c3 in Budapest, projector-stroboscope machines, manipulated by Barba, scan film material that has been stretched out through the room. The loops rattle, the lamps are in rhythm, photographs of anonymous places and people flash up momentarily and generate the sound.

By putting the projection apparatus - which in a cinema context is usually invisible - in a central position, Barba implants a potential cinematographic »heart« in the exhibition space, but at the same time sabotages its importance. There is no centre of attention, but at the most a sensuous »combing« of the periphery. Barba: »Despite the linearity suggested by the way the projector indicates a goal, a narrative - that is, the projection -, other scenes continually open up, some obvious, some concealed.«

In Barba\'s sculptural illusion-machines, you navigate through a universe of film, video and photography in which habits of seeing and listening undergo a permanent shift and from which new patterns of perception are distilled. In Barba\'s most recent work, »Piratenräume« (Pirate Rooms) which was on display in April of this year in the gallery c/o Peter Gorschlüter in Karlsruhe, the projection machine continually changes direction and speed, controlled by means of a bar code fixed on the film material. The projector seems to be operated as if by magic, forwarding and reversing, sometimes slowing down, and sometimes stopping altogether. The rooms are in fact empty, but things appear, such as pictures of doors that close seemingly of their own accord before disappearing once more. At the same time, passages or windows open up to give a view into nowhere. A sort of irrational building operation unfolds. The artist says her aim is »to manipulate analogue apparatuses with reference to digital possibilities and to include the analogue, unfinished aspect in the presentation.«

In the »Flugmaschine« (Flight Machine), viewers even have to pedal to get the right speed for the frames, because the flap that transports the film is missing. Through the flickering of the stroboscope, they see a bumblebee attempting to fly. As soon as they are synchronised with the lamp, they can see, for a moment, the bumblebee in flight. And in »Cinorama,« cinema can be seen as a social venue as well: at least two people have to be present in the room for the projectors to start running. Two halves of a night-time city portrait are to be seen; viewers can influence its course by entering and leaving the room.

The films in the installations always have a narrative structure - in »Cinorama,« for instance, five short stories without any real plot are shown on different levels over and over again owing to the way the two halves of the panorama diverge, and briefly run in synchrony. In »Navigator im Licht-Raum-Modulator« (»Navigator in the Light-Space Modulator«) we repeatedly watch clips of protagonists in their private rooms, interrupted by blank sequences. »I am interested in a kind of cinema that gives you more room for thought and is a battle of ideas and possibilities,« is the way Rosa Barba defines her multimedia research.

The artist\'s carefully composed worlds of sound and images are a pleasure to wander through. They form an audio-visual circuit, like a dream landscape whose concept is always informed by a rough-hewn, provocative aesthetic.

 

Translated by Tim Jones

 

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