PERFORMANCE
Performance runs through all of Paula's practice. For almost thirty years, through ACT Human in Singapore, her research was performative by nature. Storytelling and role-play were her central instruments: presence, listening, and transformation worked in real time, in front of a group. The body, the voice, and the moment were the material.
In the artwork, performance takes several forms. There is the performance of the installation, where the work is not finished until a body enters it. There is the performance held inside the moving image, where the trembling hand and the breath sometimes heard are the artist's presence. There is the street intervention, where the action leaves the gallery and the passerby becomes part of the work. And there is reperformance, the carrying of another artist's gesture forward into a new moment.
The theatrical dimension is strongest in Kitsch Glitz. There the installations ask for the observer's body to complete them: the sculpture that illuminates when someone approaches, the row of hearts that ends at a solitary light bulb, the heart on burnt wood that does not answer, it asks. Nothing on its own is the work. The work happens when someone arrives.
A doll house
Performance, street intervention
Venice, 2026
Paula Marcondes │ A Doll House │ Performance, street intervention │ Calle del Paradiso, Venice, Italy │ 8 May 2026, opening week of the 61st Biennale │ Duration: 1 hour 15 minutes
-
Action: live assembly of the house and setup of the camera and manuscript stations, the travelling case left in view, broadcast on Instagram Live with intermittent dialogue with online viewers and passersby
-
Elements: transparent polycarbonate and plexiglass house with repurposed mobile phone screens; manuscript Instructions to Build A Doll House: A Metaphor for Living Consciously, stacked beside the work, sign: “Please take one”; the travelling case
-
Constant: the house and the manuscript
-
Flux: the site, the passing public, the live audience, the weather and light of the day
-
Documentation: live broadcast, photograph, and video
During the opening week of the 61st Biennale, Paula built A Doll House in the open, on a canal wall on Calle del Paradiso in Venice, beneath a Gothic Madonna.
For one hour and fifteen minutes she assembled it piece by piece, the canal at her back, each part set with steady breath and full attention. A lapse, and a piece would be lost to the water. Building it was an act of consciousness. The camera and the manuscript stood beside the work, the travelling case left in view, and the act was broadcast live, drawing in those who passed and those who watched from elsewhere.
Chess between colonies
Street intervention
Lisbon, 2025
Paula Marcondes │ Chess between colonies │Street intervention │Jardim Teófilo Braga, Lisbon, Portugal │ November 2025 │
Duration: approximately 3 hours
-
Action: Chess between colonies installed in a public square, its pieces made from repurposed mobile phone screens; passersby, children and adults, learned and played Chess between colonies over the course of the afternoon
-
Elements: chess pieces of repurposed mobile phone screens and resin set on clear plexiglass cubes and digital debris board; base
-
Constant: the artwork, the invitation to play
-
Flux: the players, the passing public, the square, the weather and light of the day
-
Documentation: photographs
In November 2025, Paula set Chess between colonies in a Lisbon square, open to anyone passing. The pieces were repurposed mobile phone screens, and the game is not chess: every piece is black, and each symbol is completed only by the piece that opposes it. To play, the two sides must cooperate rather than defeat each other, and from that come communication, connection, and perhaps healing. For about three hours, children and adults stopped, learned it, and played. In one photograph a father is absorbed in his own phone while his sons move the screen-pieces between them. What remained were the photographs and the games played.
One hundred papers one paper
Reperformance of the original work
by Izidório Cavalcanti, 2025
Paula Marcondes │ One hundred papers one paper │ Reperformance of the original work by Izidório Cavalcanti │ Galeria Tato, São Paulo, Brazil │ August 2025, closing of Opacidade Ressonante │ Duration: approximately 10 minutes
-
Action: the tearing of paper, approximately one sheet for each work in the exhibition
-
Elements: a block of A4 office paper
-
Original work: Cem papéis um papel, by Izidório Cavalcanti, whose works were part of the same exhibition
-
Constant: the gesture of tearing, from Izidório's original
-
Flux: the performer, the site
-
Documentation: video
At the closing of the group exhibition Opacidade Ressonante at Galeria Tato in São Paulo, in August 2025, Paula reperformed One hundred papers one paper, a work by the Brazilian artist Izidório Cavalcanti, whose own pieces were part of the same show. Izidório is deaf. In the original, as he tears the paper he does not hear it tear; only those watching hear the sound. The work lives in that gap, the sound belonging to the audience and not to the one who makes it. The same group of artists, curators, and gallerists would show next in Lisbon, at Galeria Verso, that November, so the torn papers carried a second meaning: the displacement of the group from São Paulo to Lisbon.
Amplify Series
Video Performance
Paula Marcondes │ Video performance │ Amplify Series
-
Action: a single handheld take of approximately 90 seconds, begun with the breath and full attention to what calls, a reflection, a gesture, a cut of light; no tripod, so the trembling hand and the breath sometimes heard are the artist’s presence
-
Form: single-channel video, approximately 90 seconds
-
Constant across the series: the method, the breath, the 90 seconds, the handheld take
-
Variable per work: the title, the place, the year, the subject
Every video in the Amplify Series - here you see three examples - is a video performance, the action held inside the moving image, where the trembling hand and the breath are the artist’s presence; four of them are shown here. The forms differ, but the material is the same in each: the body, present, in real time, and the moment that cannot be repeated.