Several art forms have been intersecting in Barba’s life since her childhood near Stuttgart, in southern Germany, where she took classes in dance, flute and guitar before settling on cello. At 14, she got interested in photography and started taking portraits and landscape shots, which she developed in a school dark room or at home in the bathroom.
“I really loved this kind of alchemy,” she recalled, “making the image come out, and also manipulating it.”
She was also watching a lot of movies back then, and was drawn to the work of Italian auteurs like Pier Paolo Pasolini and Federico Fellini, who thought of his own films like paintings. When she received a Super 8 camera as a gift, she began to experiment with making her own moving images.
She studied at the forward-thinking Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, Germany — “one of the first schools where you could basically study film and art in the same space,” Barba said — and her teachers there included the experimental filmmaker Harun Farocki and the Austrian performance artist Valie Export.
Postgraduate studies then took her to the prestigious Rijksakademie in Amsterdam and to the Malmö Art Academy in Sweden, which awarded her a Ph.D. for a dissertation, “On the Anarchic Organization of Cinematic Spaces,” which ranges across astronomy, art history, color theory and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze.
These days, she spends a lot of time on the move. Though she has lived in Berlin since 2009, Barba estimated that she was traveling for about six months each year: researching projects, filming, or installing shows. Berlin was “a good place to think and to work,” she said, “but on the other hand, I guess I get most of the mental work done being on the road.”
