Shades of Blue (2025)

Title: Shades of Blue
Year: 2025
Category: video
Duration: 5:50 min
Tech: digital video, HD, color, loop
Open Captions: English

Concept and Editing: Anna Barbieri
Camera: Anna Barbieri

Shades of Blue is a quiet observation of architectural labour as it unfolds around the start of the workday. The video shows only the view from a train window, moving from countryside to city in the early morning hours. Captions appear intermittently, naming shades of blue as the sky shifts from near-black to lighter tones. These subtle changes mark time passing, situating the commute as a threshold between rest and work.Blue functions both as colour and concept.

References to blueprints and the German word Blaupause—meaning blueprint, but also trace, pause, or break—connect the changing sky to architectural drawing practices. The repeated journey to work describes a working life structured by an absence of daylight, where the brightest hours are spent in the office. Toward the end, blueprint drawings of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Johnson Wax Administration Building briefly appear, linking historical visions of the “office of the future” to the contemporary realities of architectural labour.