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:
Video Ex, Zürich, 2022
Starr Auditorium, Tate Modern, 2010