Comunidade [e o outro processo]

Comunidade [e o outro processo] is part of a film trilogy by Brazilian artists Cinthia Marcelle and Tiago Mata Machado. Together with the other two pieces, O século (The Century, 2011) and Rua de Mâo Única (One-way Street, 2013), they address human lives in the great metropolises from a metaphorical, poetic and critical perspective. Rua de Mâo Única was presented at the Brazilian Pavilion of the 57^th Venice Biennale in 2017.

The first and second parts of the trilogy address the same event – a street protest – in a visually contrasting way. While O século records a crescendo of debris on the street including rubble, stones, bins, clothes and tires that fill the viewer's field of vision, in Rua de Mâo Única it is the protesters who throw objects beyond the camera’s viewpoint. Comunidade [e o outro processo] on the other hand, presents two versions of a moving group of individuals. One version 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. Film and animation, figuration and abstraction, the dialogue between these two versions creates formal and visually powerful parallels. 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.

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. For example, Comunidade [e o outro processo] speculates on order and chaos, cohesion and dissolution, submission and rebellion, here and there. The result of a fractured social contract, Marcelle and Mata Machado reveal the instability behind a stable community that is always on the verge of breaking up. Despite this delicate balance, during the presentation of her work at the Venice Biennale in 2017, Marcelle stated: ‘I believe in collective energy.’