Automóvel

2012 - Film & Video (Film & Video)

Cinthia Marcelle

year born: 1974

gender: female

nationality: Brazilian

Cinthia Marcelle’s video work Automóvel (2012) re-edits the mundane rhythms of automotive traffic into a highly compelling and seemingly choreographed meditation on sequence, motion, and time. Shot from an aerial vantage, the camera tracks the daily commute on a small stretch of concrete highway. The camera films the traffic below in short five-second excerpts before blacking out; time begins to collapse as the video shifts between scene, and the hours compress into minutes as daylight quickly turns into night. An uninterrupted soundtrack of car sounds plays continuously throughout, both at play with the images on screen and disjointed from the video’s repeated stops and starts. The vehicles begin to resemble more abstracted forms of shape and color: flattened yet mobile, these synchronous moving blocks form an intricate dance of mechanized motion. Representing the constant flow of vehicles on a two-way urban street, Automóvel focuses on the pace of life on any normal working day, and Marcelle’s video offers a playful reimagining of a traffic jam as a symphonic composition of movement and sound. Despite its frequent visual humor, however, Marcelle also considers the struggles of a modern-day labor force and the inexorable cost of “working” in relation to time and resources. Automóvel , by extension, is also a work about stasis and the experience of being caught in an intermediate space, always in transit to an indeterminate destination that never arrives.

Cinthia Marcelle produces video works that address the mundane and attempt to make sense out of everyday chaos. In her practice, commonplace rhythms, patterns and events are an infinite resource of meaning. Her work frequently reimagines everyday “movements” such as traffic as highly formal and sequenced orchestrations. Through a time-intensive and mathematically precise editing process, she re-choreographs disordered movement, using video and photography to document the effects that her interventions have on the usual order of things. Her compositions are at once satirical and lighthearted, and her actions create situations that challenge our notions of conventional behavior by introducing humorous coincidences and connections. Marcelle’s work has been part of significant group exhibitions including New Museum Triennial, New York (2012),Tate Modern Level2, London (2012) and 29ª Bienal de São Paulo (2010). Her solo exhibitions include Pinchuk Art Center, Kiev (2011), Galeria Vermelho, São Paulo (2011), Camberwell College of Arts, London (2009) and Sprovieri Gallery, London (2009).