Blue Hall Annex: Cinthia Marcelle

The conditions of the experience are part of the experience.

Jean-Louis Comolli

The place seems huge. As the sun slowly prepares to burst into the space through the big glass windows, a few dozen people move about hurriedly on opposite, parallel sides. They perform different jobs, yet their grasp of a shared goal is clear to see. Without speaking much, they rehearse a change-out – a mainstay of their work routines, weren’t it for the importance of what’s to come.  

At the feet of a blue, furry immensity, the effort depends on collaboration among different professionals. After all, the process of changing out carpet involves multiple steps. It takes efficiency and attention to detail, an ear for how the material behaves throughout the stages in which it rests and melds with the flooring. 

Tables and chairs are piled up into a corner to make way for the job. Next up, the edges of the old carpet start getting pulled out, revealing the concrete floor. 

As some workers forcefully and precisely rip out the previous carpeting, others start prepping the new one. These processes must be concurrent. The various rolls of new carpeting are masterfully rolled out and cut to the size of each area. Precision cutting is key in ensuring the new carpeting will fit perfectly.

Due to the magnitude of the site, work plans had to be put in place spanning a few days. But this was no departure from the usual process, since each replacement unfolds at its own pace. As the carpet gets changed out, the place gradually transforms. The new carpeting brings a sense of freshness and renovates the venue, giving it a completely different look than in past years. Once the carpeting is installed and all the edges are tightly sealed, a thorough cleanup provides a finishing touch, and the furniture is restored to its original place. 

The place is so big it can accommodate the country’s most important decision-making, between legislative deliberations and federal budget oversight. It is located in Brasília, and yet it symbolically overflows from its own halls. Its movement slides away, and the blue floor spreads out all the way to a gallery in São Paulo, where it attaches to other surfaces. 

Here, the same precision cutting creates outlines. The steady hand that grips the cutting tool calculates the part for the whole, circumvents best practices, comes up with its own finish, and works its way up the walls.

This new venue mimics the carpeting laid in the Federal Senate on April 5, 2023. The image enacts a narrative unto itself and reinvents, alongside the artist Cinthia Marcelle, its journey to where it is now.  

The exhibit Anexo do Salão Azul carries overtones of a documentary film whose plotted-out script is altogether subordinated to real time. The Senate carpet change-out – a commonplace event turned emblematic in our contemporary political history by the January 8 break-in – gets converted into research material for the artist, providing the formal, chromatic, and conceptual outlines to this exhibit. 

Rolls of carpet recount, on their backs, an investigative plot of the material’s replacement and disposal process. Alongside researchers in Brasília and São Paulo, Cinthia Marcelle retraces the trajectory of this symbolic element with such rich history. The work process leading up to this exhibit involved an investigative search for the carpet, from the moment it left the Senate premises, and across different instances of government, until it finally reached the company tasked with its disposal. However, in a bid to grasp at the tracks left by the matter which attests to a radical departure in perspective, the artwork tosses and turns as it sets out to discuss what’s to come.

Looking back on the political facts that led to the complete replacement of carpeting at the Federal Senate, one stumbles upon a striking event, a reflection of the Bolsonaro administration policy of the past four years. This context helps us realize the extent to which we are socially immersed in fantasies of power and the systemic consequences arising from extremist outlooks. These are the death drives inherent to intolerance, prejudice and negation that feed into a value system doggedly bent on fragilizing any instance of freedom.

If political disagreement characterizes democratic health, and if the illusion of a conflict-free world is a feature of privilege, what can we, as a society, do to ensure democratic culture as a drive towards sociability? In other words, how can difference spur debate, reflection, and dynamism in such a way that is conducive to basic citizenship rights and opposed to the annihilation of life? 

Cinthia Marcelle prompts these and other questions by putting forth an imaginative game that summons the presence of the Federal Senate through its blue floor. At the Galeria Luisa Strina, carpeting is installed to the exact measure of the exhibition room, and half of it gets cut into multiple other halves, in sizes ranging from minimum to maximum, giving off a sense of proliferation. The material lends the space a license to perform possible deliberative instances which, through inclusion and discourse participation, can promote the invention of democracy, of a more just, informed, and politically involved society. 

To round things off, a live Senate Radio broadcast is given sound gradients in production as it inhabits the exhibition room. Its presence works as a time-space conduit, a possibility of shared listening in real time straddling these two places. 

Not by chance, the artist decides to intervene upon the architecture of the space and invites other works of hers into the setting. Dialogue between her own artworks has become a familiar procedure in her practice, a self-referential gesture, a mental, material, and visual unifying thread that provides the audience with clues to Marcelle’s creative thinking. Newer pieces borrow certain views from older ones, acting as invitations to review, and in some cases, to re-signify themselves. This movement causes us to constantly wander across her output in a more integrated way. Whether in their exhibition physicality or in the form of simple mentions, these encounters are there to render the edges visible, to sculpt out connections and lend substance to that which underpins her work. 

And so it is that upon entering the gallery, we are greeted by a double-sided white-and-blue-striped curtain mounted on two mobile rods with a metal bracket. The industrially dyed fabric has an identical copy, manually redone using a frottage technique with sticks of fabric chalk, featuring stripes in the same colors and sizes. Here, por – sem – sob – sobre – trás (by – without -– under -– behind, 2023) a series the artist informally calls listrismos (stripe-isms), assumes the index of negotiation. Its position in the room is strategic and relational, a permeable barrier that does not prevent passage, but announces the need for agreements and alliances to enable its crossing. The artwork converses with the brick wall. Because their measures are equal, they highlight the presence of the section that lends continuity to the original gallery wall. Cinthia patches up the architecture to cause the exact measures of the carpet “to fit in” with the composition of the room. An inevitable gesture of structural change. 

Possible relational readings between artworks are even further incremented as we consider pieces such as Explicação (Explanation, 2006) and Por vias das dúvidas (By means of doubt, 2020). Both feature sticker tape drawings/collages of walls onto color-matched backgrounds. The former features order. The latter, disintegration. Color is a key element of these pieces, for in addition to the nonhierarchical figure-ground evidence, their earliest editions were predominantly white, enhancing their ability to make inroads into time. The yellow color impregnated into the whiteness reminds us that persistence is intelligence towards building new beginnings. 

Thus, one could argue that the exhibit Anexo do Salão Azul is a study in form, color, and materiality. After all, these are the fields of interest that drive Cinthia Marcelle’s process, serving as reading keys into her body of work. If, on the one hand, what appeals to her is the carpet element with its raw matter, its blue tone, and its repetition in space and in contrast with other chromatic fields, engineering calculations which compose artwork and architecture, the discussion of industrial versus manual labor, there is also that which can be flexed based on form. 

In devoting herself to the dexterity of precise, mathematical cuts, Marcelle brings the sensibility of an approach that emphasizes the importance of understanding the whole by analyzing its constituent parts. In other words, the parts often play specific roles and interact in complex ways, contributing to the properties and characteristics of the system as a whole. Thus, she demonstrates a philosophical, politicized outlook as it relates to comprehending the complexity of systems and phenomena. 

Cinthia Marcelle narrates, in a subjective way, the fictionalization of a new country through an incoming administration whose mission is to restore democratic stability in Brazil. As a result, the prominence given in the show to a constituent element [carpeting] that represents the literality of this change means that Marcelle’s work can help us with one of the key challenges of this society: fostering a social pedagogy that will cause us to collectively assimilate the meaning of a Democratic State under the Rule of Law. The educational conscience that views freedom and equality as fundamental rights to be ensured by the State, as provided for in the Brazilian Constitution, reclaims the political groundwork for the existential bases of all living beings and the system itself. In other words, the will to restore alone does not suffice without a ground to stand on. 

Anexo do Salão Azul reminds us that there is no guarantee of permanence. If today we momentarily experience the euphoria of a significant government transition, if we experience a greater presence of racialized bodies and dissident sex-gender persons in leadership positions, if we are part of a novel social configuration derived from affirmative action, it is essential to have it carved onto one’s body that nothing is guaranteed. Authoritarianism, the hierarchization of subjectivities, the perversity contained in the idealization of consumer capitalism, social injustice, and the loss of conquered rights are not just indications of a recent past or of future threats; they are present as lapses of reactionary activism. 

This exhibit envisions and evokes. Just like the furry carpet that overflows from the Senate, let democratic culture be disseminated across the entire national territory, multiplying itself at different rates, the memory of its history pasted on the backs of all bodies. Let freedom and equality be rights provided in their full sense upon rock-solid pillars, so that the slightest glimpse of a threat to erode democracy is met with quicker, swifter reaction. Let it be pleasurable to tread, an invitation to lie down as a gesture of trust in what’s to come. Let there be color.

— Beatriz Lemos