Barbara Schroeder

German Italian artist Rosa Barba has, since 2004, regularly published Printed Cinema, a kind of readable and portable film, to express and dismantle the cinematic organism. The series, which won the 2006 Artist Book Award at the Ontario Association of Art Galleries, is printed alongside Barba’s film projects, creating a supplementary literature, sourced from film stills, text, and photographs and including research material and unused filmic fragments. Each issue is published on the occasion of an exhibition, where it is distributed for free for the limited time of the show.

Addressing key tendencies in Barba’s work, questioning how we occupy space by investigating crisis through an unusual treatment of time and language, the issues are intended not as companions to Barba’s installations but rather as extended and free-form experiments in word and image that can be encountered alongside cinematic experiences or stand on their own. The filmic projection is translated onto paper and confronted with its conditions—its materiality and temporality—reshaping the text and image fragments from the moving image into stillness. The shift in medium from projection to print emphasizes the difference of such experiences of image and text, exposing their relationships, overlaps, and hierarchies. Alongside Barba’s film installations, sculptures, and text-based wall works, these publications further her inquiries into the ambiguous nature of reality, memory, and landscape while probing the precarious relationships between historical record, personal anecdote, and fictional narrative. The publication series records Barba’s continuous critical engagement with the material and sociopolitical conditions of the cinematic apparatus in a contemporary environment dominated by visual information. By means of translation, layering, and fragmentation, the publications reveal structuring principles of how visual information and the moving image specifically become a means of knowledge production, organizing the social and geographical dimensions of the spaces we inhabit. Drawing on a conception of space and language that is equally shaped by cultural, scientific, geological, and geographical transformations, Printed Cinema expands those dimensions that project the possibility of activating a collective subconscious—an artistic method to release and reach into the oscillating environments of the works they accompany. Based on actual, present phenomena—contested places and precarious social transformations, such as those in Peru or at the border zone of Cyprus and Turkey—the series reflects and documents recurring themes in Barba’s artistic research and methodology in order to open doors into new and unpredictable spaces.

The artist explains, “The publication project Printed Cinema continues my audiovisual work as a personal reflection on the essence of the cinematographic: images are merely articulated in the space in between images. Gaps, ellipses, dialectics between images—essentially modernist notions—are essential in that respect. In Printed Cinema, this is expressed in the editing principle, as well as in the oppositions between film and printing, between text and image. The specific distribution method, of course, extends the project into a wide range of cultural and social contexts. In this way, Printed Cinema challenges the outer edges of the artist’s book. Mechanisms proper to the film medium find their translation in a different context.”

This collection brings all issues of Printed Cinema together in a handsome archival and expandable case. The purchase of the edition comes with an ongoing subscription to future issues. (The first ten issues were published in 2008 as a box set by the Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Koenig and quickly sold out.)