Marcelo Cidade
Realização impossível ou o poder como soma de seduções 2 (Impossible Accomplishment or the Power as Addition of Seductions 2)
This series of photographs reflects Marcelo Cidade’s incessant walks or drifting through the city and his chance encounters with a certain street poetry like the Surrealists or Situationists before him. He captures incongruities or everyday simplicity and highlights their suggestive power. The composition and framing of these interventions specially emphasizes the object of interest and the humor of the context. Signs, architecture, styles, color schemes, offer the viewer a sense of place while remaining potentially universal.
Sculptural happenings like this one – a telephone cabin or some such structure entirely covered in silver tape – point to the city’s perpetual mutations. The title conveys uselessness, failure, tension, in between states but also empowerment. According to the artist, this force is arrived at through persistent accumulation of noticed sensualities and a keen nearly amorous eye on one’s environment.
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.