Biography

Marcella França is a multidisciplinary artist originally from Brazil. Her art practice ranges from visual arts, contemporary dance and new technologies. Primarily trained as a dancer, she received a BFA in visual communication specializing in audiovisual. After completing a postgraduate diploma in Video Dance – Movement’s Aesthetics, she started combining new technologies with performances, video art, and site-specific works to broaden her artistic expressions. França’s work has been exhibited internationally including SAT – Société des Arts Technologiques (Montreal, Canada), Montréal en Lumière Festival, Oi Futuro (Brazil), MAPP MTL, and I-BiT Mapping (Online).

Approach and works on display

Marcella França pursues the poetic rapture in the relation between the Water element and existential human issues. Through her research in science and philosophy, França explores the physical-chemical aspects of water such as fluidity, volatility, materiality and immateriality, correlating them with intangible concepts of impermanence, the becoming and memory. These subjects are intertwined with ideas of movement, decolonial issues and ecofeminism, and given visibility through hybrid visual languages that she creates with new technologies such as generative and interactive audiovisual effects and extended realities (XR, VR, and movement sensors), incorporating with videos, performances and immersive installations.

How Can We Dance While The Earth is Burning? (2020)

How Can I Dance While the Earth Is Burning? aims to give visibility to the poetic yet ominous relationship between fire and water in climate phenomena related to global warming. The video demonstrates the correlation between wildfires across the world, particularly in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil, and the melting of the polar ice caps – urgent global issues we cannot ignore. The title of the work is inspired by the song Beds are Burning (1987) by Midnight Oil, which was written to criticize the removal of Aboriginal communities from their lands. Thus, the work bears other layers of meaning, just as such forced displacement continues to happen with indigenous people in Brazil who are direct victims of criminal fires in the Amazon.

Works by the artist