By WAC | 2 SEP 2022

MACBA combines poetry and social criticism in its exhibition spaces with the first show that offers a global perspective on Cinthia Marcelle's work, through which she explores and formalises the dynamics of collectivity.  

A conjunction of factors includes works dating from 1998 to her recent works, and is nourished by photographs and films as well as spatial interventions and two large-scale installations, which refer to his well-known and important site-specific formats produced in different cities: New York, Porto Alegre, Sharjah and Vienna, among others.

The exhibition, curated by Isobel Whitelegg, underlines the collective nature of artistic practice and authorship for Marcelle: projects must be undertaken not only individually but also in close collaboration with others. In her artistic approach, she therefore focuses on how to involve participants from different backgrounds, from workers and musicians to people she knows in the everyday sphere. The actions carried out by these collaborators, which she photographs and films, fluctuate between the staged and the spontaneous, and seem both fiction and reality at the same time.

The complicity and representation of others in Marcelle's work alludes to the binary oppositions and hierarchies of labour, class and race that condition our everyday interactions and the established social and political order. Her work is pregnant with the desire to disorganise the former in such a way that we are able to re-imagine the movement of the collective and the everyday within our society.

A Conjunction of Factors also highlights the aesthetic singularity of this artist: from a poetics of accumulation, multiplication and repetition, to her use of materials and colours that evoke specific places and contexts. Marcelle deploys her language using everyday objects and materials such as earth, chalk, dust and bricks, with the aim of creating other circuits that disrupt existing systems and suggest other ways of relating to others and to the world. 

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