The film installation Pirate Spaces frisks the empty spaces of an imaginary city. The spaces seem to be connected to a web not recorded on a map. The Pirate Rooms are places promising possibilities, gaps, vessels of ideas, centers of storms. The rooms appear light and calm, even though the camera scans through them impatiently. The film projector is reeling back and forth, slowing down, stopping, as if an invisible operator is examining the material in a search for something. It is made manifest as a sound inquiry of a process, perhaps the indecisive eye of an editor, not being able to make up their mind about how to assemble the material under investigation. There are awkward beings, mathematical codes appearing and disappearing and hindering the inquiry, but at the same time delivering new hints. The rewinding and forwarding of the projector produces combinatorial results, details become visible and more coherent. Nothing in the rooms seems to function: doors close by themselves, others are doubled, passageways lead to nowhere, elsewhere an exit opens in the ground, the window looking outside reflects the room itself. Ghosts of emerging formulas of floor plans haunt an irrational architecture. It is no misleading image or any lunatic labyrinth, just places holding their own fantasies. The modified 35mm projector is conducted by a barcode attached to the film; the film material itself describes the outline of a floor plan as a visible sculpture in the exhibition space.
Pirate Spaces, 2002 35mm film, modified 35mm projector
Images 1, 2: Film still © Rosa Barba Image 3: Installation view at Müscarnkok Museum Budapest, 2002 © Rosa Barba
Pirate Spaces, 2002 has been on display at the following locations:
Centraal Museum, Utrecht, 2006
Kunstverein Kassel, Fridericianium, 2005
Argos, Brussels, 2004
Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, 2002
Müscarnkok Museum, Budapest, 2002
Galerie Meyer-Riegger, Karlsruhe, 2002