Inside the Outset, Evoking a Space of Passage

Inside the Outset: Evoking a Space of Passage is a twofold project by artist and filmmaker Rosa Barba, consisting of a film and an open air cinema, installed in the buffer zone between Paralimni and Famagusta, in Cyprus. The artist uses the notion of quantum entanglement ––a phenomenon that occurs when the quantum state of each particle, even when physically separated, changes accordingly to the state of the group is in–– as an allegory for natural interdependence and artificial partition. Combining topographical models, aerial photography, 16mm film, and underwater imagery of the Mazotos shipwreck, the film’s several media, registers and genres, refuse to cohere aesthetically, rather, they create layers of sensory, perceptual and semiotic elements, connecting the present blight to the riches of the distant past, the scorched earth to the abundance of marine live thriving inside the amphorae of an undersea wreck, the human to the geological and the earthly to the spiritual. The figure of the interface recurs throughout the film, albeit under different forms, as its pivotal image. Be it as the screen, as the surface of the sea, or as the empty frame installed in the buffer zone, the interface is at once a surface, which lends itself to inscription and a liminal space: a place beyond the technological field, able to intimate poetic and political registers, debordering the borders ––spatially as well as socially.

Year

2021

Director

Rosa Barba

Duration

31 min

Country

Italy

Language

English, Modern Greek (1453-), Turkish