Rosa Barba: Disseminate and Hold

Her new film “Disseminate and Hold” will be premiered during the Bienal de São Paulo 2016 and is included in the Bienal’s exhibition entitled “Live Uncertainty” (September 10–December 11, 2016).

After being selected as the winner of the PIAC – Prix International d’Art Contemporain 2016 at a ceremony in Monaco in November 2015 for her work Subconscious Society, a Feature, Barba was awarded a sum of 40,000 EUR, which included 20,000 EUR to fund the production of a new work. Barba’s new project Disseminate and Hold, made under the guidance of Artistic Director Lorenzo Fusi, investigates man-made geographies and landscapes, and how these are often deeply enmeshed with political agendas and utopian visions.

The new film work introduces us to the Minhocão (or “Big Worm”)—an elevated highway that runs through the heart of São Paulo. Built in the 1970s, with the intention of doubling traffic capacity into the centre of the city, the highway has always been synonymous with darker political undertones. In the work, the artist considers not just the history of the Minhocão, but also its current existence, examining the complex relationships between the road, the surrounding buildings and people of São Paulo. Barba reflects on the traces that history leaves on the landscape and urban environment, and suggests that these changes often only manifest themselves in a society’s subconscious.

Berlin-based, Italian artist Rosa Barba was awarded the prize for her work’s engagement with concepts of time as something inscribed in landscape and in language, cutting across history and subject matter. Barba is particularly interested in abstracting the medium of cinematography, pushing it to the limits of its possibilities through the creation of three-dimensional installations that involve sculpture and printed material. Subconscious Society focuses once again on her interest in time’s materiality. The work was partly filmed in Manchester’s Albert Hall and around a flotsam off the North Kent coast. Both abandoned spaces are re-inhabited in Barba’s Subconscious Society, blurring the boundaries of time and place. Evolving versions of the film have been screened in New York, Manchester, and Margate, as well as at the 2014 Berlin Biennale. Subconscious Society will be publicly screened in Ibirapuera Park, near the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art (MAM) on September 7, 2016 at 8pm.