a round around a round around a round around a round around a round around

Marcelo Cidade presented an outdoor sculpture installation under the Nylandsbrua bridge, in the central Oslo area of Grønland from October 2019-January 2021. Placed at the border between two city districts, the sculpture took the form as a movable gate that partly gives way or blocks access depending on its position. Cidade’s installation evokes on the circulation of citizens, the idea of flux and the concept of individual freedom.

Click here to read more about the artist participant, and watch an interview about the project.

Is there such a thing as a liberating barrier?
Marcelo Cidade’s work for osloBIENNALEN is a revolving barred gate in steel installed beneath the Nylandsbrua bridge. The gate pivots on its axis, a bar at its centre, and resembles a manually operated revolving door. The area beneath Nylandsbrua bridge – a notorious site of shady activities – separates the Grønland area from the rest of the city. Grønland has always been a district with its own identity. Now it is famous for its immigrant population of mainly Muslim origins. In the 1840s,

Grønland was situated outside the city boundaries, characterized by prostitution, alcoholism and petty crime, so that the city authorities proposed making the area a ‘free city.’ But Grønland became a part of Oslo, although it remained poverty-stricken. This was where cholera epidemics first broke out, and where the Salvation Army was first established in Norway. In this way, the boundary between Grønland and the rest of the city has a long history and is sharply felt by the citizens.

Cidade’s work reminds us that politicians have the power to set up barriers and gates between desirable and undesirable areas, gates that can shut people out – or in. But this gate is easy to traverse, and invites us to swing it around, climb on it, play with it. Here, it is the population that has the power.