Rosa Barba's 'From Source to Poem' at Pirelli HangarBicocca

Rosa Barba's solo exhibition at Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan, curated by Roberta Tenconi, centers on the film 'From Source to Poem' (2016). The 35mm color film, produced with CAPC musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux and Pirelli HangarBicocca, with Tabakalera, was shot at the Packard Campus of the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Virginia. It documents a vast collection of over four million moving image and sound recordings spanning obsolete formats to digital files. The exhibition features fourteen works from 2009 onward, including 'A Shark Well Governed' (2017), a 45-minute film that explores how objects lose identity in landscapes. Barba's practice investigates raw resources left behind, non-linear time, and the loop as a mechanism for meaning loss. Other works include 'The Empirical Effect' (2009), filmed in the red zone of Mount Vesuvius with survivors of the 1944 eruption, and 'Enigmatic Whisper' (2017), shot at Alexander Calder's studio in Roxbury, Connecticut. The show challenges viewers to develop mental elasticity in perceiving reality.