Abstract

This article proposes an enquiry on a material-discursive practice of light through the work of artist Rosa Barba (b.1972). In particular, this article examines how Barba’s interest in archival and site-specific strategies presupposes a reconfiguration of the representation and the meaning of light in relation to documents, memory, and affective experience. While focusing on the intersection between film, sculpture, and installation, Barba’s work articulates a poetics of distance in between documents and past events, carried out through a materiality of light, projection techniques, and sight-specific practices. By drawing attention to the field of material encountering, her work opens to individual and collective experiences of light within contexts. While examining a choice of artworks by the artist, the article argues for a feminine materialism of light, understood through the thickness and the gesture of a light’s discursive practice.