Cinthia Marcelle

Automóvel

Cinthia Marcelle’s video work Automóvel 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 scenes. 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.