Contemporânea

Projectors tilted or suspended like celestial bodies, luminous sculptures, lengths of film orbiting along unpredictable trajectories, intermittent beams of light, and mobiles of coloured filters together compose the complex installation unfolding within the dimly lit expanse of the Nave at CAM — Modern Art Centre of the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon. For Drawing Vocabularies, her first solo exhibition in Portugal, Rosa Barba has conceived an installation that reconfigures the gallery recently redesigned by the Japanese architect Kengo Kuma: an open space overlooking the museum gardens through expansive glazed walls, airy and flooded with natural light—seemingly far from the ideal setting for an exhibition of projections and light works, which conventionally demand darkness and enclosure.

Rather than resisting its relationship with the outside world, however, the exhibition draws strength from it, exploiting the porosity of an architecture that functions as a membrane connecting interior and exterior. The life unfolding beyond the building—the surrounding landscape and the visitors moving through it—appears like a sequence of floating images projected onto the slightly darkened glass. Within the subdued light of the exhibition, visitors find themselves inside what resembles a machine room or a projection booth, surrounded by the very apparatus that makes the transmission of images possible.

Curated by CAM director Benjamin Weil at the conclusion of his tenure, the exhibition can be understood in continuity with the presentation recently held at MAXXI in Rome, curated by Francesco Stocchi (Frame Time Open, 26 November 2025 – 8 March 2026). Comparing the two installations—the MAXXI exhibition occupied one of the sweeping curved galleries designed by Zaha Hadid—reveals the extent to which Rosa Barba’s distinctive notion of “expanded cinema” is conceived in close dialogue with architecture. The metal framework supporting and interconnecting the sculptures establishes spatial continuities, composing a landscape, a kind of score shaped in response to the intrinsic qualities of the site. It suggests a profound affinity between the making of an individual work and the exhibition itself, both resulting from a process of montage that transforms their constituent parts into a single living organism.

“My work takes a conceptual approach that considers cinema in an architectural sense and as an instrument, where the environment, the screen, and the projection can be combined or pushed forward to create another spatiotemporal dimension that is concurrent with and goes beyond the context of interior or exterior space. Uncertainty and speculation exist within that expanded space. It is an anarchic dimension and offers a new foundation for thinking and acting through destabilising the old hierarchy of the components of cinema by freeing them up from their original uses and letting them interact in new and unforeseen ways.”[1]

These remarks by the artist provide an essential key to her practice, which revolves around cinema—not for its myth-making capacity, but as a tool for investigating the qualities of space, its ability to shape spatiotemporal experience, the complex mechanics underlying the transmission of images, and the ways in which these processes activate the viewer’s perception and awareness. Barba approaches cinema through its material components—its hardware, its vocabulary—deconstructing and reassembling them, allowing them to contaminate one another, and assigning them functions that are at times deliberately improper, thereby generating an atmosphere of productive instability.

This sense of tension is heightened not only by the metal structures linking the works but also by the openness of the Nave itself, which allows the entire exhibition to be grasped almost at a glance. What emerges is a complex, dynamic, unstable choreography that resists total immersion, instead compelling visitors to continually reorient their gaze. The works interact with one another: they listen, interrupt, overlap. Projections, sounds, and mechanical movements weave a fabric of delays, interferences, accidental synchronisations, and discontinuities. Technology is exposed with all its quirks and imperfections, in its inefficiency. The devices are largely obsolete, belonging to the archaeology of image transmission, yet Barba reactivates them by exposing and amplifying their most elementary material operations, the tactile dimension of their mechanics: scratched film stock, celluloid strips joined with adhesive tape to generate continuous loops, and other visible traces of assembly and use.

One is reminded of the earliest years of cinema, and of Joseph Cornell’s film collages, produced during the 1930s with little more than scissors, adhesive tape, and coloured filters. By rescuing discarded B-movies destined for destruction and transforming them into poetic, dreamlike narratives intended for private screenings for his disabled brother, Cornell invented an entirely new cinematic language rooted in the materiality of the medium itself—one that would prove profoundly influential in the history of experimental film.

Moving through the subdued light of the Nave, surrounded by intermittent flashes, the unmistakable rhythmic sound of the projectors, the gentle warmth radiating from the machines, and the luminous dust suspended in the air, one rediscovers the sense of wonder that accompanied the earliest years of cinema: the miraculous quality of technology, the phantasmagorical nature of moving images—a form of magic gradually eclipsed by our everyday familiarity with screens. In an increasingly immaterial digital culture, Rosa Barba restores cinema’s physical presence, making visible what takes place behind and around the lens, all that is usually concealed or erased from view. In doing so, she lends tangible form to both time and space, revealing how their modulation underpins the complex mechanics through which images come into being and vision itself is made possible.

Yet Barba’s sculptures neither demystify technology nor indulge in a nostalgic celebration of analogue film. Rather, they emancipate cinematic apparatuses from their original functions, transforming them into instruments through which to reflect upon the material conditions of communication. Images themselves become almost secondary to the infrastructures that make them possible. Drawing Vocabularies demonstrates that every image is the outcome of a network of mediations, delays, translations, and interferences.

The anarchic dimension evoked by the artist in her own statement becomes particularly evident in the abolition and reconfiguration of the hierarchies governing the constituent elements of cinematic machinery. In Stating the Real Sublime (2009), a 16-mm projector hangs suspended from the ceiling, held in equilibrium by the strip of celluloid running through it. The projected image consists simply of a white rectangle of light bearing the scratches caused by dust accumulating on the film surface over the course of the exhibition. A comparable process unfolds in One Way Out (2009), where the film’s trajectory is diverted through the gallery’s ventilation duct, which draws it upwards. The resulting projection functions as a kind of optical soundtrack, as the film gradually reveals—with a slight delay—the scratches produced by its friction against the metal duct. In both works, the white projection becomes a palimpsest recording the material history of the film itself.

Within Barba’s practice, the traditional distinction between the arts of time and those of space appears strikingly obsolete. Time and space merge into a fundamentally synaesthetic dimension. In Wirepiece, Triple Stops (2025), for instance, the projector is transformed into a genuine musical instrument by adding four strings stretched across the gallery. Emerging from the tilted projector, the strip of film brushes against the strings like the bow of a violin, tracing a continuous circular loop that turns the exhibition space itself into the resonating body of an instrument played by light.

Here, There, Where the Echoes Are (2016–2021) likewise draws upon cinema’s vocabulary while hybridising it with music. A group of projectors performs a choreography of synchronised light in response to a recorded composition by percussionist Chad Taylor. The result is a large-scale environmental sculpture whose immaterial component takes the form of a mobile of coloured light, shadows, and floating images that only fully materialise through their encounter with the architecture and with the bodies moving through the space.

Alongside sound, written language constitutes another element that contaminates and expands the cinematic medium, recurring throughout several works. Spacelength Thought (2012) consists of a mechanical typewriter striking individual letters onto a blank strip of 16-mm film as it passes through a projector. One by one, the typed characters appear on the wall as projected images, giving rise to an intermittent language, while the transparent film accumulates in an amorphous heap on the floor, ironically suggesting the feverish productivity of a prolific writer when, in fact, the text has been generated by a machine. Language is slowed down, stretched out, and transformed into visual matter. Within the interval separating the typing of each letter from its appearance in projection lies the significant process of transmission—and, inevitably, transformation—that occurs whenever one code is translated into another.

In A Shark Well Governed (2017) and Lines Within and Between Are Seldom Pieced Off With Neat End Punctuation (2023), writing is inscribed directly onto the film strip in ink, which wraps around a luminous cube in the former work, while in the latter it is printed onto a film that winds around a cubic metal structure. Both take the form of minimalist kinetic sculptures that also function as works of visual poetry.

The materiality of writing is further explored through the physical presence of typographic type in Isolation of Information (Roller) (2015) and Language Infinity Sphere (2018), two casts respectively shaped as a cylinder and a sphere, produced from metal printing characters that once belonged to a publishing house after its closure following forty years of activity.

The characters, arranged without any discernible order, densely cover the surfaces of both works, transforming them into writing instruments when inked and rolled across a sheet of paper. In particular, Isolation of Information (Roller) evokes an archaic printing tool, producing a form of writing that is not linear but potentially open to unforeseen outcomes. An instance of Language Infinity Sphere activated can be found in Language Infinity Sphere (Recording) (2018): a nebula of spiral-shaped graphemes that reminds us that the alphabet contains, in latent form, all possible texts, revealing the discrete nature of written language—as well as of cinema—and the infinite combinations generated by alphabetic codes. The reference to infinity in the title of the work alludes both to this generative potential and to the books actually produced by the former publishing house, whose printed characters are condensed into the tip of this extraordinary, oversized ballpoint pen.

Some of Barba’s kinetic and luminous sculptures invite a state of pure contemplation. Defined by the artist as “cinematic paintings,” these works transform film into a sign that emerges against a transparent or illuminated surface. The viewer’s gaze lingers on the unpredictable trajectories traced by the celluloid, on the sinuous, uncontrollable movements generated by its rotation around motor-driven pivots.

In Poised Compression (2023), three strips of film rotate inside a glass case around three motorised spools, which continuously turn in one direction or the other, generating a landscape shaped by constant shifts and displacements. In Stellar Populations (2017–2022), the composition is horizontal: the same elements are combined with metallic spheres that interact with the film rotating around its pivots, as though they were components of an unknown mechanical system. In Off Splintered Time (2021), the film moves across multiple overlapping circular panels, creating a fully immersive 360-degree sculpture. Finally, in Thick Harmonies (2026), the film coils into a tight spiral, recalling the celebrated short film Anémic cinéma, made by Marcel Duchamp in collaboration with Man Ray exactly a century earlier, in 1926.

While recalling the self-contained mechanisms and obsessive perpetual motion of the machines célibataires, other works draw upon a technological imaginary closer to instruments of measurement and astrolabes, such as Sensible Suns (2025) and As Fixed in Flux (2025). The connection with astronomy is fundamental in Rosa Barba’s practice: she has previously dedicated works to the American astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt (1868–1921), who, by studying variations in brightness while analysing photographs of pulsating stars in distant galaxies, succeeded in calculating the relationship between the Earth and the galaxies. (Send Me Sky, Henrietta, from 2018, not included in the exhibition, is a direct homage to the astronomer.)

The exhibition space, populated by machines and kinetic sculptures, takes on the appearance of an observatory. The reference to astronomical observation poetically also evokes the delay inherent in every image we perceive: a consequence of the complex mechanics of vision, shaped by relations between phenomena, the speed of light, and the fact that matter is never truly inert.

This retrospective, which traces almost two decades of the artist’s practice, concludes with the film Myth and Mercury (2025), commissioned for the exhibition by CAM together with MAXXI. The film shares the same aggregative principle that guided the development of the entire exhibition: a montage that is at once fragmented and organic. The Mediterranean forms the conceptual axis of the work, which combines images of a fishing village, the submersion of an underwater neutrino telescope, and sequences from the natural world. These are interwoven with episodes from the life of the Italian Marxist intellectual and political figure Antonio Gramsci, co-founder of the Italian Communist Party and of the newspaper L’Unità. Gramsci devoted significant attention to the questione meridionale (the Southern Question), denouncing the imbalance between northern and southern Italy as a problem directly connected to the responsibilities and very structure of the state. In 1926 he was arrested and imprisoned by the Fascist regime, remaining in prison for over 10 years, almost until his death in 1937.

In the gallery where the film is screened, the large 35-mm projector and its looper constitute an imposing presence. Like a lighthouse, it emits a discreet beam of light, revealing the Mediterranean as a space of encounter: an ancient and futuristic, multicultural and transdisciplinary laboratory—just as Gramsci’s thought on hegemony and the role of intellectuals continue to this day to illuminate and inspire historical research and the commitment to social emancipation.

As part of Weil’s programme, Rosa Barba was in turn invited to curate an exhibition in the Mezzanine adjacent to the Nave, selecting works from the CAM Gulbenkian’s art collection. The opening words of the text introducing the exhibition read: “In Drawing Vocabularies, I have invited works from the CAM Collection to come together in the Mezzanine. Perhaps this ‘gathering together’ is a conference, but even more a choreographed session, closer to the arrangement of a performance, with the works reacting to each other in a rhythm throughout a notation in space.”

This constitutes another “organism”: a performance in which works interact with one another, participate in a broader discourse, and reveal connections among themselves.

Some of these works are particularly resonant with Barba’s practice, such as those by Helena Almeida, which transform the support itself—the sheet of paper, photographic paper, or the projection screen—into elastic, permeable, traversable membranes (Desenho Habitado, 1977 and Ouve-me, 1979). Here, illusion gives way to reality; fiction is exposed and disrupted. Meaning is inseparable from the means of transmission, from the signifier itself, which becomes the protagonist, as it does in Barba’s practice.

The exhibition also includes word mobiles by Salette Tavares (Bailia, 1979/2014), another example of writing materialised within space; the measuring instruments embedded in the original portable works of Manuel Alvess (Modèle Réduit de la Table de Multiplication ou de Pythagore, 1971); the cloud of graphemes in Ana Hatherly’s Sideral (2002); and the cosmic dimension of the dreamlike automata in Espiga Pinto’s gouaches from the 1970s.

The anarchic dimension emerges in Paula Rego’s gesture in Turkish Bath (1960), painted on the reverse of a canvas by her husband, the British painter Victor Willing, in which she is portrayed nude. To create her own work, Rego turned the portrait upside down: a symbolic gesture of reversal, resistant to hierarchies, and anarchic in spirit. It echoes one of the opening works of the exhibition—the deceptively simple yet radical gesture of Stating the Real Sublime. 

Rosa Barba

CAM - Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian