With her film installation Aggregate States of Matters, Rosa Barba poses a question: How can a form of visual expression convey the environmental and social impact of an issue as fraught as climate change?
For this work, the artist interviewed members of Indigenous Quechua communities in Peru, who have had to adapt their daily practices due to the melting of a nearby glacier. Abandoning journalistic conventions like voice-over narration, she interweaves text and images of the country’s wide-ranging terrain. In doing so, she questions the traditional binary of nature and culture, engaging with philosophical, spiritual, and cultural approaches to the changing environment and to time itself.
Through custom technology, Barba also explores how film archives and transmits knowledge and information; her use of celluloid—an increasingly obsolete material that degrades with each revolution through a projector—resonates with the fragility of cultural memory and the natural landscape.
Organized by Erica Papernik-Shimizu, Associate Curator, Department of Media and Performance, with Abby Hermosilla, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Curatorial Affairs.
