MYTH AND MERCURY

2025, 35mm film, color, optical sound, 21’56”

Co-commissioned by MAXXI – Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI secolo and CAM – Centro de
Arte Moderna Gulbenkian; Co-produced by Fondazione In Between Art Film and Hamburger
Kunsthalle

ROSA BARBA

Rosa Barba is an artist who currently lives and works in Berlin. Rosa Barba engages within the medium of film through a sculptural approach. In her works, Barba creates installations and site-specific interventions to analyze the ways film articulates space, placing the work and the viewer in a new relationship. Questions of composition, physicality of form and plasticity play an important role for the artist as Barba examines the industry of cinema and its staging vis-à-vis gesture, genre, information and documents. Her film works are situated between experimental documentary and fictional narrative. They often focus on natural landscapes and human-made interventions into the environment and explore the relationship of historical records, personal anecdotes, and filmic representation, creating spaces of memory and uncertainty

Myth and Mercury was filmed across various locations around the Mediterranean. Beginning at the Gramsci Library in Palermo, following a fishermen procession at sea, diving down to a seabed neutrino telescope and exploring archives about the transformation of agriculture, migration, and the political landscape of the Mediterranean over the past centuries — the film reflects on how we might understand these interconnections and their evolving meanings in the future. It envisions the Mediterranean as both a futuristic blueprint and an idea in continual transformation.