Barnas examines the way in which we create our own past. To address this issue Barnas uses the re-arrangements and variations of the Goethe Haus in Frankfurt, made by various curators over the years, presented each time as the authentic situation in which Goethe wrote his novels. The film also plays with the way that technology, in the form of photographs and digitalization, has formed a range of descriptions and realities that are all both concrete and virtual.
Versions of Goethe (2014), further explores the tension between fixing a new reality in a description and the actual reality that is being overwritten. It looks at the interplay between analogue and digital technology in forming the frameworks with which we aim to represent and conceptualize reality. In the reworking of original images, Versions of Goethe are digitally created images of Goethe, Barnas uses the fraying edges of representation -both visually as in content- and presents us with altered versions of the same image that each seem to demand originality. It is exactly in their difference that they come alive.