Una conferencia comisariada

In Una conferencia comisariada. Sobre el futuro de la fuerza colectiva dentro del archivo the Italian artist Rosa Barba (Sicily, 1972) brings together numerous works from a representative group of artists from the twentieth and twenty-first century who interact and converse with each other on the collective consciousness in the context of a collection.

By way of choreography, the artist obliges the various works to converse between themselves, creating a discourse-conference on contemporaneity and the most significant current artistic trends. Each author speaks with their own voice, while some works react to each-other. While the symposium that results may seem anarchic, it is orchestrated as a concert or a choir that meets to sing a song. The archive is understood as a set of individual timeless expressions, choreographed like a musical score, which can collectively raise its voice at the same time, to achieve the implacable timelessness of art.

Faced with the question the artist asks herself on what is essential in a work of art, Barba does not expect or want to achieve a number of definite conclusions, but rather aspires to discover hidden assumptions, eliminate obsolete ideas and formulate new issues and timeless needs. The exhibition offers a discourse open to many different personal readings on the Collection, far from an interpretation of an institutional, canonical discourse, where the spectator is invited to approach new ways of thinking about what the archive, the Collection and memory really mean.