The 35mm film They Shine is set in the Californian Mojave Desert. Thousands of enormous solar panels punctuate the vast American desert. The panels – glistening machinery, slowly changing position to follow the sunrise – configure a mirror surface behind which another world unravels: divorced from technological reality, and guided by an equally disconnected, utopian and/or religious faith associated with the power of technology.

 The film intertwines scenes of the moving solar panels, performing a slow dance or refined choreography, with voices of people from the local community who express their thoughts about the future and talk about the images evoked by these machines. A site dominated by an extreme natural condition is no longer simply re-identified by its scientific exploitation for humankind, but moreover re-evolves as a transfigured 'second nature': a surface as impenetrable as the desert that it covers.

 

They Shine, 2007

35mm film, color, optical sound, 4 min



Images 1, 2: Film still © Rosa Barba
Image 3: Installation view at Giò Marconi, Milan, Italy, 2009 © Rosa Barba



They Shine, 2007 has been on display at the following locations:

Bocca Lupo, House of Cyprus, Athens, 2014

La Pedrera, Barcelona 2011

Prairie Art Gallery, Alberta, Canada, 2009

Giò Marconi, Milan, 2009

Fondazione Sandretto, Turin 2009

Kunsthalle Basel, 2008

Villa Romana, 2008

Stedelijk Museum Bureau, 2007




They Shine, 2007 has been screened at the following locations:

Swiss Institute, New York, 2024

Videoart at Midnight, Berlin, 2022

Video Ex, Zürich, 2022

Starr Auditorium, Tate Modern, 2010