Rosa Barba They Are Taking All My Letters, 2025
70 mm film, aluminum, LED, Plexiglas, motors
187 x 262 x 15 cm
The new wall-mounted kinetic sculpture, They Are Taking All My Letters, 2025 features 34 vertical strips of 70mm celluloid film that move across its rectangular surface, lit from the back. The 34 lines are in constant motion as a sequence of words in white printed letters on a black background scroll up and down. The fragments draw on texts by the American poets Susan Howe, Charles Olson and Robert Creeley, as well as on the artist’s own writings. The excerpts are held together conceptually by themes of time, flickering light and language.
One challenge is in reading the texts: whether by moving one’s eye up or down a vertical loop or by jumping across the lines to observe a constant rearrangement, a new editing and orchestration is ever evolving and changing. The work creates an interesting temporal parallax by using a nearly obsolete medium such as celluloid film across the grain, so to speak: Not only does the work exclusively “depict” text, not images as such, but because it is not moving at the 24 frames per second that are at the root of film’s illusion of movement, the film is not strictly speaking cinematic. Instead, each thread moves at its own speed, turning the film into a vehicle for text, and just as with speech, each speaker has their own pace of expression.