Shot in the Andes, the work Aggregate States of Matters deals with the increasing impact of climate change on remote areas. At its core, the film pivots on the ambivalent negotiation between the binary idea of nature and culture, oscillating within the contemporary discourse on the environment, and its complex layers based on scientific, philosophical, spiritual and cultural approaches. For Aggregate States of Matters, Barba worked with communities that are affected by glacier melting and its geological time becoming present today. In a cautious, yet scrutinized exploration, the film illustrates blurring and melding boundaries between human and non-human actors. While the indigenous population profits from the benefits and wealth of farming, which rapidly increase due to changing environmental conditions, they concurrently face fast-moving challenges in their spiritual and cultural lives. Deriving from an extensive dialogue with the local people, Barba sensitively draws a critical picture of a world where progress and growth have stopped making sense, without reducing the complexity of the current situation in the era of the Anthropocene. By doing so, the artist thematizes the increasing awareness and evidence of human interference on Earth, which has led to a general perception of urgency, intangibility, and a state of permanent crisis, asking the central question of representation as already posed by the scholar Rob Nixon:
“How can we convert into image and narrative disasters that are slow moving and long in the making, disasters that are anonymous and that star nobody, disasters that are attritional and of indifferent interest to the sensation-driven technologies of our image world? How can we turn the long emergencies of slow violence into stories dramatic enough to rouse public sentiment and warrant political interventions, these emergencies whose repercussions have given rise to some of the most critical challenges of our time?”1
1 Rob Nixon. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011