Rosa Barba

The 35mm film “From Source to Poem”, shot in the United States, features images from the largest media archive worldwide, the Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Conservation of the Library of Congress, located in Culpeper, Virginia. The film is an invitation to think about the spaces in which history and cultural production are preserved in order to be passed on to future generations. On the one hand, it pursues the research initiated with “The Hidden Conference” (2010-2015), a three-part film work exploring museum storages and whose title refers to imaginary conversations taking place between artworks inside these invisible spaces. “From Source to Poem” shifts the focus from artwork to archival storage, juxtaposing images from the media archive in Culpeper with a study of rhythm, and images of cultural production with those of industrial production. The film exposes the preservation of cultural outputs, but also their digitisation for the future. A vast number of the archives’ holdings are sound material (audio recordings, wax discs, vinyl and LPs); a sonic memory, which is rescued and mixed into the soundtrack as a means to set in motion otherwise unlikely dialogues. On the other hand, this film draws on a specific approach of architecture and landscape: contrast in media and historically specific contexts is used to think through how we describe – technically and speculatively – what exceeds our perception. However, the editing of the film is neither fully explanatory nor sequential. The audio-visual narration of space is used to uproot places from their pragmatic circumstance in order to suspend them in an indetermined temporality.