With a desire to dismantle hegemonic structures, Cinthia Marcelle creates playful, dramatic interventions in everyday life with a focus on disorder and disorganization. Through installations and performances, she breaks up the patterns of daily interactions by making minor adjustments or reversals to common activities and objects, thus challenging our notions of conventional behavior. For On Air (2019-ongoing), Marcelle constructed a temporary radio station and adjoining stage. To assume roles in the restaging of a play, visitors chose songs in the station or remotely via the internet, which were broadcast in the space. Serving as dialogue, the selections interrupt and overlap each other to create a continually unpredictable production.
Alternatively, Marcelle stages forms of labor or simple tasks and activities with non-professional performers. They continually repeat their actions, the sum of which produces poetic, unexpected results. In Fountain 193 (2007) a fire truck drives around in a perfect circle as a firefighter sprays water from a hose into the center of their orbit to create an inverted fountain. In Marcelle’s view, “the extraordinary may come from repetition, as an effect of accumulation. I don’t want repetition to produce a void or emptiness, as is often the case with a job routine. It is about placing the mechanical side of a job within a new dynamics and new systems in order to produce the “extraordinary.”
Confrontation (2005) begins with birds-eye view of a busy intersection in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, at nighttime. When the traffic light turns red, two fire jugglers enter the crosswalk, begin tossing torches in front of the waiting cars, and dutifully exit when the light turns green. The number of jugglers increases with each round of lights. Four jugglers enter the screen at the next red light to repeat the performance, followed by six, and then eight. However, this last group of eight, which takes up the length of the crosswalk, does not exit when the light turns green. They resume their juggling much to the dismay and annoyance of the drivers who begin honking incessantly. A car even inches toward them and a motorcycle barrels through their line, sending torches to the ground. But the jugglers continue their performance, which has now progressed from lighthearted entertainment to a serious “confrontation.” The screen soon cuts to black as the honking continues, accompanied by sirens, leaving viewers to imagine the chaos and danger that ensues.
The blare of horns also prompts one to consider why and what it means that the jugglers’ act engenders such anger and contempt from the motorists. The roles have reversed, as the buskers upset the usual power dynamics of the intersection, exerting control where they usually solicit for food or money by creating a barrier, a wall of fire, that prevents the usual flow of traffic. As the tenor of this encounter changes from amusing to potentially violent, Confrontation speaks to how ingrained certain aspects of daily life are and how delays and disruptions, even if entertaining, are intolerable to most. Marcelle thus calls “the illusion of order that humanity tries to project onto everything that surrounds it” into question and suggests the fear and the fury that can result when norms—from everyday routines to larger social and cultural expectations—are confronted.—Kanitra Fletcher