Marcelo Cidade
450 Hayes Street (excavation site)
450 Hayes Street (excavation site) by Marcelo Cidade is a large scale photograph documenting the artist’s excavation of a parking lot located at 450 Hayes Street in San Francisco, a former section of the city’s Central freeway and current condominium site. The cut shape mirrors the precise shape of the Kadist gallery floor, where the concrete was relocated as part of his residency exhibition entitled Somewhere, Elsewhere, Anywhere, Nowhere. Through this concrete graft, Cidade inextricably links the city with artwork. His installation observes while it also inscribes an entropic building situation within this specific place in the city, and simultaneously, any place in any city.
Marcelo Cidade is an artist of situations, if not a Situationist of a new age, as he drifts through city streets around the world creating actions, interventions, films, photographs or drawings. His interests lie in the possibilities of public space and its connection with the private sphere, he resists forms of constraint and moves freely within the human community and through urban environments. Questioning systems and working in the peripheries or interstices allows Cidade poetic freedom in his artistic practice and open engagement with language, art history and politics. In 2005, he wrote “To resist = to (re) exist” 2000 times in downtown São Paulo.