QUESTIONING POWER AND COLONIAL STRUCTURES: CINTHIA MARCELLE INTERVENES AT SERRALVES

Serralves Museum hosts beginning, middle, beginning, Cinthia Marcelle’s (Belo Horizonte, Brazil, 1974) first solo exhibition in Portugal. This site-specific commission for the museum’s Central Gallery features an installation through which the artist interrogates systems of power and forms of social organization—core concerns that have shaped her artistic practice for more than two decades.

The installation draws inspiration from the work and thinking of Nêgo Bispo, poet, philosopher and Quilombola leader, and proposes an analysis of linear time and its conceptual ties to colonial structures. These views on social architectures—highlighted by the artist as still deeply embedded in everyday life—are reconfigured within the installation.

By transforming the space into one governed by cycles of repetition, the resulting work foregrounds a perspective that calls for the recognition of ancestral knowledge and Indigenous cosmologies. The project is the outcome of an extended dialogue between the artist and the museum team on the conceptual possibilities of the space, and was developed in collaboration with the transdisciplinary collective of architects and artists vão, with curatorship by Inês Grosso, curator-in-chief of the museum.

Cinthia Marcelle. beginning, middle, beginning can be seen until 3 May 2026 at the Serralves Museum, Dom João de Castro, 210, Porto (Portugal).