Rosa Barba

Artist Rosa Barba (*1972 in Agrigento) has earned an international reputation with her films. She sounds out the movie industry with respect to various forms of staging, such as gesture, genre, and information, taking them out of the context in which they are normally seen and reshaping and representing them anew. According to Ian White: “The effect of this contests and recasts truth and fiction, myth and reality, metaphor and material, to a disorienting degree that ultimately extends into a conceptual practice . . . .”

A purely documentary publication would not be in the spirit of the artist, which is why besides expert knowledge, comprehensive essays by well-known authors bring personal experience into play. Above all, however, the selection of film stills, preproduction sketches, and pictures by Barba herself help to turn this book, as it were, into a work of art in its own right.

– Hatje Cantz