rosa barba’s aggregate states of matter

<give:climate/indigenous communities> support the impactful work of <care peru>

<learn:art> rosa barba’s aggregate states of matters (mar 15, 2024–jun 9, 2025 moma)

My wife and daughters took me to the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City on January 25th, 2025 for my birthday. As we wandered from gallery to gallery, I came across an exhibit that consisted of sound and video installations. I recorded an indecipherable voice playing through the speakers for a few moments, which you hear in the opening of the song marz (along with the low-level din of museum goers). I believe that this came from the work of Rosa Barba.

One of the exhibits Ms. Barba presented that day was the film installation Aggregate States of Matters. In it, Barba poses the question: How can a form of visual expression convey the environmental and social impact of an issue as fraught as climate change?

Rosa Barba is a visual artist and filmmaker known for using the medium of film and its materiality to create cinematic film installations, sculptures and publications that explore the ambiguous nature of reality, memory, landscape and their relationship in representing reality. The description from the MOMA website describes this work as follows:

“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.”