Rosa Barba on Conducting Sunlight and Unbodied Performance

Not surprisingly, the Sicilian-born Barba felt at home in the Mediterranean climate of the Napa countryside, with its undulating terrain and fertile farmland. The late October sunlight infused the atmosphere, further aestheticising the lush surroundings.

Barba and I spent time getting to know one another, sitting amid the abundance of plants, flowers, and trees at the place she chose to stay during the installation period. The artist conveys her feelings for local, agricultural, scientific, cosmological, technological, and cinematic knowledge with personal warmth. She expresses a sensuousness of thought and narrates her ambitious projects in a soft-spoken manner. Instead of a formal on-the-spot interview, we decide to develop our dialogue organically in our respective time zones.

Open Field Poem is emblematic of Barba's practice as she projects, reflects, and conducts light to materialise presence.

Attentive to geologic time, natural artefacts, traces of land use, human-made relics, and what they reveal and conceal, Barba has long been fascinated by the topography of the southwestern United States and has made several works in the Mojave Desert, including Western Round Table (2007). The installation—comprising two 16mm projectors, cast light, clear film, intangible silhouettes, and sound—stands for a secret thinktank meeting held in the Mojave in 1949 between Modernist practitioners in the arts and sciences, including Frank Lloyd Wright and Marcel Duchamp. For The Long Road (2010), the artist concentrates on an abandoned, decaying racetrack so large that it is visible from the sky. Barba tells me she considers filming its route to be 'drawing with the camera to trace the physicality of time.'

Open Field Poem is emblematic of Barba's practice as she projects, reflects, and conducts light to materialise presence. In step with agrarian time, at the building's threshold, the artist generates nebulous incorporeal visions at ground-viewing level by directing sunlight with a specially designed heliostat through glass panels in tones of amber, auburn, and claret. Situated on the roof, the programmed movement of the heliostat activates the red, orange, and yellow spectrums associated with both astronomy and winemaking.

I am present for the final stage of positioning as Barba tests and refines the results. She is extremely focused, observing the nuanced interplay of sunlight, shadow, and tint and watching the intangible illumination cast warmly tinged rays that slowly migrate and rest on fragmentary poetic texts she has incised in the stonework ground.

Whether drawing with sunlight, a camera, or projected light, Barba's work is simultaneously physical and metaphysical. As in many of her projects, here, Barba orchestrates an active inscribing of space with light, colour, and text, creating a glowing yet filmless cinematic experience.

JARosa, I'm curious about the natural and social landscape of your earliest home. What kind of landscape did you grow up amid?

RBI grew up between two very different social and natural landscapes. From early on, between southern Sicily, where I am from, and south Germany, where my parents migrated for work. Both places were small rural towns. The village in Sicily was filled with life—people populated the narrow, steep streets—and it was surrounded by farmland, which had lots of animals. The village was very close to the beautiful coast and the sea. The small town in Germany was quiet, had very organised infrastructure, was not very busy, and was surrounded by woods that stretched as far as the Black Forest.

We travelled back and forth by train twice a year, contemplating for two days while looking and feeling the air through an open window on the changing landscape. Each time, we would also enter a boat when crossing Italy to Sicily, where we would draw on the interior walls of the ferry while waiting to be allowed onto the deck. I often found my inscriptions years later. I recall the drawing of a creature that was half human and half animal.

JAYou've repeatedly focused on traces of use and function in the Southwestern United States in works from some years ago. I'm wondering what attracts you to that topography.

RBI began my investigation of inscriptions and social transformations manifested in the landscape while making my first film in the Mojave Desert in 2006, when I had spent several months in and around Los Angeles. Followed by a series of works in 2007 that form a trilogy, They Shine, Waiting Grounds, and Western Round Table, I was fascinated by the inscriptions one finds preserved in the desert, and I understood the land as a screen and the landscape as a document. I started to chronicle them with my 16mm camera.

In The Long Road (2010), we see a kind of alphabet or language that we can no longer read—an image engineered into the earth that will lose its context in the future. The film shows an abandoned racetrack from the late 1980s that is slowly receding into the landscape. I am interested in how it relates to reality, not just as a pre-existent form but as a potential condition or an imagined object—a part that remains behind or constitutes a break in the narrative, representing land use over geological time.

We circle the racetrack from an aerial view, where the image resembles geometric Nazca drawings, a series of large ancient geoglyphs in the Nazca Desert in southern Peru. Some of these drawings are not readable anymore, as the tools to translate them have been lost or have not been transmitted generationally.

Suspended at the intersection of the present and past, and perhaps also of the future, the racing site emerges from the sand like an immense drawing, the stigmata of a now abandoned and forgotten modernist culture, ready to be transformed into something that is different and unexpected, not yet wholly expressed and probably inexpressible. Drawing with the camera to trace the physicality of time.

JAWhat sites, places, or topographies are luring you at the moment?

RBI am interested in different perspectives on topographies or places with inscriptions of contingencies. Sometimes only visible between the frames. I mean that it is not visible when seen as a single image. But by putting these images in motion from different perspectives with the film camera, other mental images are set free between the frames. I call this a 'flickering state'. A vibrating sequence composed of subsequent information and non-information is the device, which no longer represents a situation or object. The outcome is a drawing or abstraction that culminates in an idea.

These can be different kinds of signs in the landscape that we leave behind and yet whose meaning can't really be translated or projected into the future. These can also be documents and even rumours—narratives that people haven't written down but that exist as source material in some oral form, embodied by the people inhabiting those landscapes. I am experimenting with how to draw a trace of the physicality of time with my camera or site-specific installations. Looking for 'documents' in the landscape—which manifest themselves in sculptural ways—is always an important method in my work.

JALet's zoom in and focus on Open Field Poem. I'm wondering about the specific research you did for this project and how the wine-growing process influenced your thinking.

RBI made several visits to the different growing areas and had conversations with the winemakers about their relationship to the terrain and their alchemistic and often experimental journeys in cultivating the grapes and producing the wine. The vineyard slopes have an almost choreographic arrangement so that the sun's rays can affect all the vines, but each grape gets a slightly different exposure to the sun and therefore creates another taste. One enologist described the variation of colours and taste, which is different every year and depends on the intervention of each winemaker and relationships to raw material and processing. 'There is a decent amount of scientific understanding about making wine, but there is also a lot that we don't understand from scientific standpoints, so a lot is experience, working in different vineries, with different winemakers and the landscape.'

I was very curious to learn in these conversations about the role of the field workers too and how they can conduct the growing journey by calibrating the exposure to sunlight while directing the growth through specific cuts.

I also spend a lot of time in Sicily in the fields with my family, witnessing the care for the different trees and being part of it every year when harvesting olives, walnuts and cactus figs. A lot of knowledge got passed on, but still, everyone had a very specific touch with the plants. My father was virtually caressing them with enormous respect while getting a lot of work done.

I wanted the site-specific piece to react with the movement of the sun and project ever-changing colours through the glass panels we manufactured for the work. Natural forces activate the piece; it changes throughout the day and across the seasons.

JAWhat drew you to the spaces of winemaking and the Louis M. Martini tasting room? Tell me about your relationship to its architecture and aesthetics.

RBI was attracted to the building as a fruit processing station, originally a distillery, connected to the former tramway through a dedicated spur, where traditionally all the harvest came together. A collection point for the grapes exposed to weather over time. A sort of archive. John Thomann built the space in 1883. In 1933, Louis M. Martini built a winery production facility, which is now the tasting room.

I tend to regard cinema in an architectural sense, whereby the environment or space, the screen, and the projection can be combined or pushed to create another space 'beyond'. I imagine this exists in both interior and exterior spaces at the same time. It is a space shot through with a sense of uncertainty and speculation.

I was looking specifically for an entrance area—a kind of waiting room for travellers—that has a connection to the sky. The towering window shafts at the entry of the tasting room excited me. I thought I could create a cinematic experience there through light and the alchemy of colours.

JAYour resulting piece works beautifully, emphasising the skylight and marking the threshold at our feet with textual fragments you embedded in the passageway's floor. Even before the vineyards' wines activate visitors' senses, Open Field Poem presents a visual apparition that is at once discreet and compelling, initiating anticipation and nuance and opening their consciousness to the sensuous spaces of craft, care, and pleasure to come.

RBThis stage for the sun's performance is subtle and may not immediately be noticed by everyone who enters the space. The coloured glass plates are positioned inside the shafts like a claviature, creating a musical notation of overlapping colours with tuned intensity.

I'm interested in confronting the division between public and private, fantasy and reality, to open up or expose an indistinct space.

JAYou produced a customised heliostat as part of this work. How does this perform? Does the heliostat amplify the sun's passage and direction? Or does it modify its 'natural passage' to harness sunlight, target routes, and illumination? Is it designed to conduct sunlight in specific areas at specific times?

RBIt's designed to modify the sun's passage and harness sunlight and target routes. The heliostat conducts sunlight into specific areas at times.

JAWhen sunlight is present, can the piece have static moments or periods? Does the action get precisely repeated? Or are no two moments alike?

RBYes, it can have static moments, but it will produce a different quality of light every day. Even though the choreography of the movement is repeated daily, the position of the sun in the sky changes every day across the year. Therefore, the angle of the sun beam that hits the heliostat moves, and the light intensity and colourisation therefore change constantly too. Noon in the summer produces white light, and in the winter it has a yellow tint. As the sun lowers, it will go across more atmosphere and break the rays differently. I am very interested in this natural alchemistic procedure for colours.

JATell me about the rectangular glass plates that you installed in the chamber between the ceiling and the skylight. What influence do they have in and on the space? I gather that the tones you chose correlate with winemaking and evoke Louis Martini's carefully achieved grape elixirs.

RBThe coloured glass acts as a filter but also as a rendering membrane where the sunlight passes through and creates another quality or energy for the space by mixing with the colours it encounters. It's a sort of embarkation that is created—a new narrative.

. . . astronomy and cinema share, in different ways, fundamental aspects of uncertainty and speculation.

The idea to install handblown coloured glass filters in the shafts came from previous investigations and works I produced when investigating the overlaps and speculative common fields in astronomy and cinema. For one iteration of The Color Out of Space (2015), I transformed images of objects in our solar system gathered at Hirsch Observatory at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute into a moving-image work that I projected through handblown colour plates.

For Open Field Poem, I wanted to introduce the cosmological and colour spectrum in this winemaking space, where all the elements are present too, and the shifting of the limits of a colour spectrum is also an effect.

JAEchoing those in This Space Populated by Infinite Colors (2021), the hues you've selected span the red spectrum, which, in turn, suggests the colour filters used in astronomy and cinema to variously enhance viewing celestial objects and rendering film.

RBI've been exploring the affinities between astronomy and cinema for many years. Both engage with concepts of light, time, and distance and are arguably composed of only these elements. On another level, astronomy and cinema share, in different ways, fundamental aspects of uncertainty and speculation.

JAThe sun produces visible light, and red, which is at one edge of the spectrum of a rainbow, has the longest wavelength. My superficial understanding of chromatic telescope filters is that, through absorbing and transmitting light, they mitigate its dispersal, which optically refines the visibility of celestial bodies. Red causes the most profound perceptibility, followed by orange tones and yellow hues.

RBYes, the chromatic telescope filters allow us to make objects or celestial bodies visible to our eyes. These mechanisms of translation from one language sphere to another are very inspiring to me. This is also the case with the flickering stars, which the astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt discovered and made us understand the scale of the universe.

JAYou customised one of the colour plates, which reads as amber and reminds me of your interest in geologic time scales and cumulative rather than linear models of time.

RBI was searching for in-between steps in the known colour spectrum. For me, time means deep geological time, like a time-exposure photograph, but taken in a way that the image doesn't blur—instead, what is visible is the depth and structure of a movement or a history, with all its changes.

I am thinking of time as a layered slab, with geological periods stacked on top of each other rather than organised into a single extended line.

JAYou also implanted texts in the floor that reveal transient thoughts from various sources. I'm wondering what criteria you had in mind for including a text fragment or phrase.

RBI used text fragments of poems by Sun Ra as I was already working with Sun Ra's poems for my research and film Radiant Exposures—Facts Run on Light Beams These Days (2022), where the predominant motif of the film is the human-made landscape with large expanses of rectangular panels reflecting the sunlight. These reflective panels concentrate sunlight, creating and collecting energy. The shimmering light and the blurring of the imagery make the sun's presence palpable.

The research I was doing about the sun and the texts I was reading greatly affected Open Field Poem. I am also drawn to the notation of Sun Ra's language, which reflects his phantastic musical compositions too.

I like to question time and constantly examine its volume, as well as the authority of language and the reliability of its source.

JAYou've translated these handwritten phrases into stone, essentially archiving disparate moments, ideas, and feelings, imprinting the floor with poetry. The phrases are presented in different orientations and form a montage across the span of the floor.

RBI am interested in collapsing physical and dimensional space with mental and conceptual space. There are shifting elements in the point of view and voice of the reader. Throughout my work process, I question how we occupy space by investigating crises through an unusual treatment of time and language. Time is conceived as an accumulation, an archive, rather than a linear progression. Language is abstracted, difficult to read or hear, eluding its normal semiotic function. With this method, I like to question time and constantly examine its volume, as well as the authority of language and the reliability of its source.

The texts construct a fragmented dialogue. Reading them feels like overhearing momentary thoughts and observations. The embedded texts are like fossils—materialised human traces, evidenced through handwriting.

RBThese fragmented sentences are meant as an ever-evolving arrangement of suspended words and themes, which dissolve and reappear in different functions when the sun highlights them. These are dialogues with modulating meaning in space. The sun path is conducting them in some way, and as you might start reading the highlighted one, it will change the rhythm and meaning over time.

JADuration is a central aspect of much of your work, as it is here.

RBYes, I examine and evidence duration is in all its versions, also framed by an astronomical understanding of light as distance travelled.

JADoes Open Field Poem readily join or extend from your previous works and investigations into geological, solar, biological, and agricultural time scales?

RBA lot of my works are non-chronological continuations of thoughts and motifs from previous ones. It's like a 'Spacelength Thought', which is also the title of a language–film sculpture of mine. Open Field Poem connects with and extends from many of my films and site-specific installations.

JAWhile your installation is vertically and materially demarcated by the heliostat and mirror on the roof and the floor, the sun and weather relative to the precise locations of these elements are needed to activate and reveal the volume of the work and its kinetic temporal character. For this reason, I can't really say where the work ends, which is exciting. How do you define the work spatially? Its physical and metaphysical reach?

RBThat is great that you said that. I am interested in a work evoking another space beyond the actual defined elements, bringing in things we can see and those we cannot. The heliostat is visualising a concept or an idea and collecting with its mirror a concentrated sun flow, which is then made visible and activated through the shafts and the colour plates. The work changes, and its visibility changes every day and with every season. The physical and metaphysical reach are in constant flux. The piece is a work in search of the liminal, of spaces that only become visible through contrast with other spaces. I'm interested in confronting the division between public and private, fantasy and reality, to open up or expose an indistinct space.

JAI think of your work in relation to some of the spatial and chromatic methods of Luis Barragán, for instance, the Capuchin Convent Chapel, Tlalpan, Mexico City, which he renovated and expanded on between 1954 and 1963. In coordination with the daily and seasonal paths of the sun for that location, he conducted sunlight through stained glass windows into rooms enriched with intense shades of yellow and magenta, producing a constantly changing luminous reflected light that turns areas and walls brilliant golden and copper hues.

RBThis sounds very beautiful. I have not seen the works yet in person and cannot wait to experience his concepts of landscape architecture, revealing the colours of Mexico's almost white sun.

JAAs in some of your previous installations, here you project, reflect, and conduct daylight to materialise presence. You generate nebulous incorporeal visions through the directed light shining through coloured glass. You spoke of your attention to inscriptions and traces of past land use and 'drawing with the camera to trace the physicality of time' in relation to your film The Long Road.

Here, you've orchestrated an active inscribing of space with light and colour, creating a cinematic experience. Drawing with sunlight. —[O]

Rosa Barba: Aggregate States of Matters is currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York until 14 February 2025. Barba's work is also on view in the group exhibition Untranquil Now: A Constellation of Narratives and Resonances at Hamburger Kunsthalle, Germany, until 19 January 2025.