Introduction
The Hidden Conference is a three-part film series which Rosa Barba shot at different museum storage facilities. This series is a continuation of Barba’s investigation of cultural storage areas and archives which she had started when she was invited to curate the exhibition A Curated Conference: On the Future of Collective Strength within an Archive where she brought together forty three works dated from 1926 to 2009, from the collection of the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid in 2010. The Hidden Conference series started with About the Discontinuous History of Things We See and Don't See (2010), shot at the storage area of the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. A Fractured Play (2012), the second part, was shot at the archives of the Capitoline Museums in Rome. The series came to an end with the third part About the Shelf and Mantel (2015), which was shot at Tate’s storages in London.
All three films evoke the discussions one can imagine artworks in the museum storage spaces might have with one another. As the artworks by various artists from different times – seen classified and stored according to their dimensions and forms in different storage arrangements – become the protagonists of each film’s narrative, they also coexist with each other while they are projected simultaneously on the three screens in the space. Their invisible nexuses and silent coexistence are enlivened besides scientific or chronological claims by the restless camerawork and the montage of textual fragments and sound elements. In the diagram placed at the entrance, Barba demonstrates a possible web of links among the participants of this hidden conference, most of which aren’t contemporaries of each other.