Over the last two decades Barrada has shared the breadth of her work at the intersection of history, social memory, and contemporary politics. Decomposition and materiality of colour retrace a lineage of lost histories and ways of making and thinking. Found and degraded forms register the tension between the forces of nature and colonial and capitalist systems of time management and cadence, which function as markers of discipline and productivity. For Barrada, slowness and improvisation can be forms of resistance. Through research and practice in the art and science of natural dyes, and an awareness of how representations of time shape our experience, Barrada has located and reclaimed rhythms and temporality.
The 16 mm experimental film installation A Day is Not a Day (2022) is a meditation on the industrial-testing process known as “weather acceleration”, which studies the fading of colour and the production of decay. The purpose of these industrial labs is to simulate the effects of the sun in a condensed time frame in order to test the durability of consumer products and materials such as plastics, automotive and domestic parts, paints, and textiles against fading and corrosion. Workers share surreal fields and offices with machines, and it is the human eye that must be constantly calibrated as a tool of measurement. Meditating on the relentless nature of the mechanised processes that take place in these facilities, A Day Is Not a Day explores the simultaneity of the marvellous and the monstrous. Formally, Barrada’s filmmaking entwines a specialized visual vocabulary of age and decomposition with an exploration of motherhood, inheritance, and subjectivity. The abstract, peeling colour forms filling the screen might seem to refer to the history of modern art, but actually describe the fatigue of synthetic materials and nature’s assertion of rot and fading by subtle, inexorable processes that are imperceptible in real time.
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