Cinthia Marcelle often works with groups of people, inviting them to move through everyday spaces in subtly choreographed urban interventions that she records. She thus documents confrontations and generates collective stagings half-way between spontaneity and fictionality, but always referring – at times metaphorically and sometimes more literally – to the fragile balance that sustains human life. In this line of work, Comunidade [e o outro processo] (2016), signed by Marcelle and Tiago Mata Machado, presents two versions of a moving group of individuals. One is a recording of real people and the other an animated drawing of geometric lines. Filmed from a high-angle, a recurring technique in Cinthia Marcelle's videos, the movements of around fifty people standing in line, or else coming together and apart, are replicated by lines and other geometric figures. Between one shot and the next, a black screen is inserted, accompanied by the sound of a drum that intensifies according to the degree of agitation or dissolution of the figures. During the presentation of her work at the Venice Biennale in 2017, Marcelle stated: ‘I believe in collective energy.’

On this video, the artist Cinthia Marcelle and the curator Isobel Whitelegg talk about the Cinthia Marcelle: A Conjuntion of Factors exhibition.