Printing Cinema? Printed Matter, Exhibition, and Film in Rosa Barba’s Work

Rosa Barba’s practice, at the intersection of experimental film, sculpture, and installation, engages with the different components of the cinematic apparatus—16 mm projectors, the reel, light, sound—but treats them as the minimal units of a language that she re-composes, thereby creating a tension between materiality, image, and text. Her work is based, in part, on the transposition and translation of elements traditionally associated with the sphere of film within the space of a gallery or museum. Since 2004, in parallel to her installation and exhibition projects, Barba has been developing a series of artists’ publications entitled Printed Cinema. Each issue, published on the occasion of a particular exhibition, brings together views from her own installations with texts, photographs, and other material. The page and the space of the book have been investigated by artists as alternative or expanded exhibition spaces, creating different modes of presentation and dissemination of artworks. This essay will attempt to read Barba’s project in relation to the history of the artist book as a conceptual practice, following media theorist Matthew Fuller’s proposal of the “book as diagram” and as “differentiated and generative”. By so doing, it will explore the relationship between her installations and exhibitions, and Printed Cinema, not only as one of adaptation from one medium to another, but as co-articulation between two dynamic, processual, open forms.