In Rosa Barba’s film one hears the voice of a former slave, recorded among the two thousand and thirty first-person accounts of slavery collected in the nineteen-thirties by the WPA (Work Projects Administration)—plus other voices, superimposed and compressed, culled from the depths of history along with thousands of other available sounds—while the camera ranges this subterranean world via long corridors, passing offices, shelves, metal boxes, wires, boxes full of cassettes, headphones, and different projectors adapted to various image and sound formats.

 — Elisabeth Lebovici,“Yes, These Bleak Shores,” in: Rosa Barba, From Source to Poem, Hatje Cantz, 2017, p. 133