The Long Road

For Rosa Barba, human interventions in the desert represent traces left in the landscape for future generations.

This film shot using 35mm reel presents an overview of an abandoned racetrack in the Mojave Desert in California. The ruin appears like an immense circular drawing emerging from the sand. The artist treats it as a sign, like a scar from a modernist culture belonging to the past. For her, the desert becomes an archive of human experience. lt is also a homage to Robert Smithson's famous land art work Spiral Jetty (1970), which is inevitably transformed and disappears as it is subjected to the force of nature.