Barbara Marcel
Barbara Marcel (Rio de Janeiro, 1985) is an artist and experimental filmmaker interested in the cultural roots of nature and the troubled heritage of colonial imagery. Her artistic research PhD at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar investigates the essay film as a historiographical tool for decolonial thinking with and through images, with the Botanical Gardens in Berlin-Dahlem and its tropical plants being her current material of study. Parallel to her individual research, she often collaborates with other artists, researchers, and activists on projects resulting in visual and sound pieces, installations, lectures, publications, and participatory workshops about ecological relations and processes of thinking and practicing in times of environmental crisis and increasing social inequalities. Recent exhibitions and screenings include Disappearing Legacies: The Word as Forest, Zoological Museum Hamburg, Hamburg University and Tieranatomisches Theater, Humboldt- University Berlin (2018); Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2018); La voluntad de la forma, Espacio Pla Buenos Aires (2018); Fit Frame to Content, Urlaub Projects, Berlin (2017); Tropic Matters, V240 Amsterdam (solo show, 2017); Omonoia Athens Biennial (2016); There will come soft rains, GMK Berlin (2016); Vision and Fear Station, Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig (2015); On Projection, Kühlhaus Berlin (2015); Through the looking screen, 175 Gallery Seoul (2015); and Desvenda at Galeria Marta Traba, Fundação Memorial da América Latina, São Paulo (2013). She received her BA in Film Theory and Practice from University Estácio de Sá in Rio de Janeiro, and her MA in Artistic Work within Media and Science Related Image Production from the Art in Context Institut, Universität der Künste, Berlin. She holds a scholarship from the Heinrich Böll Foundation and has lived in Berlin since 2009.