Cadu Cinelli is an actor, visual artist, storyteller, theater director, artist, and educator with a long educational career that includes a master's degree in Human Geography, a bachelor's degree in Performing Arts and in Arts Integrated in Education.
He has specialized in Jungian Psychology: Art and Imaginary, and in Arts and Culture Mediation and is currently pursuing his doctorate at the Federal University of Paraná in the Graduate Program in Geography, and in a supervised internship phase at the Faculty of Psychology and Education Sciences at the University of Porto, Portugal.
In his current activities as an artist, he has focused mainly on the revision and debugging of audiovisual and textual materials produced as part of the project “Percursos Afetivos”, which consists of the revision of some videos and their edits, and the follow-up of weekly productions. “Percursos Afetivos” is a traveling storytelling project that involves the design and implementation of creative interventions in urban environments using bicycles. During the interventions, while pedaling with his audience, he tells imaginary stories about the places and landscapes visited. It is a truly unique project.
From “Percursos Afetivos” comes “Percursos Afetivos (Sonoros)”, which consists of a podcast, and videos of the stories with sign language interpretation, “Em Libras: Percursos Afetivos”. The public’s response has been extremely intriguing, and this has been what aroused the artist’s attention to continue and better understand the work of storytelling, in addition to the face-to-face artistic experiences.
As a real artist, he reinvents himself and has a great capacity for adaptation. Some of the skills that allow him to build his current work are a result of the pandemic, when he had to readjust to some procedures and master video, audio and editing techniques in order to meet the demands of the pandemic reality. This resulted in new knowledge and opportunities for future projects, such as podcasts and online performances, video recordings, and the publication of a book. As the artist puts it: “The encounter and sensitive contact between audience and artist has different contours and formats. The artistic experience takes place in different contexts, in one with an individual and sometimes private aspect, and in another with a collective and public feature.”
This need to adapt is nothing new for the inhabitants of the art world. Artists have always faced several challenges, such as, according to Cadu Cinelli, financial insecurity, which encourages the shortening of processes and the accumulation of functions; the absence of a greater diversity of calls for proposals, edicts, and applications to host more multidisciplinary artistic projects; and the short deadline for deliveries. But none of this is a reason to stop.
The project “Tapetes Contadores de Histórias”, is also an initiative to be highlighted, since he dedicates most of his time to it. During the last 20 years, the project has consisted in sewing and telling stories with the most diverse materials. It creates story sessions, events, seminars, and exhibitions to awaken the interest of children, young people, and adults in the arts and in reading. They study tales of oral tradition, children’s literature, text-textual interactions, and the plastic manifestations that people make as contexts for their storytelling.
Same as “Percursos”, this project also involves interdisciplinary work, with a strand of performances in multiple locations. Both initiatives have met with different audiences in terms of socioeconomic class, gender, color, age, and geography, among other things, and use multiple channels of expression, including website, podcast, in-person presentations, workshops, exhibitions, book, and video.
One of the biggest advantages of being part of Rosto Solidário and contributing to the CLOE project is that I have had the opportunity to meet several artists and write about them and their projects, but I must say that I have never met someone with as much depth, knowledge and experience in the art world as Cadu Cinelli: there is still so much to learn about him. And to be able to observe his accomplishments in real time is an unparalleled luck.
The small size of this text box prevents us from writing in depth about the artist’s extraordinary efforts. A book could possibly do some justice to what Cadu Cinelli has given to the art world and the world at large. As a result, we encourage our readers to follow his work and learn more about his significant projects.
