The Art of Brasília

2000-2019

Sophia Beal

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030371371
• Print ISBN:
  9783030371364
• Subtopic: Art General

People from outside of Brasília often dismiss Brazil's capital as socially divided, boring, corrupt, and emotionally cold. Apparently its founders created not a vibrant capital, but a cultural wasteland. However, as Sophia Beal argues, Brasília's contemporary artists are out to prove the skeptics wrong. These twenty-first-century artists are changing how people think about the city and animating its public spaces. They are recasting Brasília as a vibrant city of the arts in which cultural production affirms a creative right to the city. Various genres—prose, poetry, film, cultural journalism, music, photography, graffiti, street theater, and street dance—play a part. Brasília's initial 1960s art was state-sanctioned, carried out mainly by privileged, white men. In contrast, the capital's contemporary art is marked by its diversity, challenging norms about who has a voice within the Brasília art scene. This art demystifies the capital's inequities and imagines alternative ways of inhabiting the city.

© The Author(s) 2020

S. BealThe Art of BrasíliaNew Directions in Latino American Cultureshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37137-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. An Introduction to the Art of Brasília

Sophia Beal¹

(1)

University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA

Sophia Beal

Email: [email protected]

Keywords

Brasília cultureBrasília art

End Abstract

The Image of the City and Contemporary Federal District (DF) Artists

Brasília has not fared well with cultural critics (Fig. 1.1). It was inaugurated in 1960 as Brazil’s new capital and the world’s most ambitious modernist endeavor. But the city has been dismissed as emotionally cold, boring, hostile, vacuous, artificial, calculated, and inhumane. One critic described it as something “Kim Il Sung might have commissioned after a dalliance with Scientology” (Moser 68). “If Hell needed an architect, Niemeyer would be in with a chance” remarked another critic after visiting the capital (Daniels 37). David William Foster writes: “Brasília may now have been the official capital of the country for fifty years. Yet it has never become anything other than a bureaucratic enclave, with none of the iconic, mythic, or symbolic associations attributed to the three historical centers of the country [Salvador, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo]” (São Paulo 15). A fictional photographer in João Almino’s Brasília quintet refers to the city as “my anti-Rio” (Livro das emoções 26).¹ In 1960, Simone de Beauvoir, happy to leave Brasília, predicted that it “will never have soul nor heart, nor flesh and blood” (A Transatlantic 534). A travel blogger writing in 2014 echoed de Beauvoir fifty-four years later: “… I would not recommend that you visit … [Brasília because] … there is no character, no soul, no heart” (“The Impossible Search”). In the world’s eyes, Brasília is a city with no soul.

Fig. 1.1

Brasília, Brazil

(Map by Avian Ciganko-Ford, from U-Spatial at the University of Minnesota)

For over fifty years, the DF has been the object of contempt for transient visitors whose stays took them no further than the palaces of the Plano Piloto (Pilot Plan), the initial footprint of the city (Fig. 1.2). From that vantage, Brasília appears as a relic, not a lived-in city. In 1987, the Plano Piloto was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site . In protecting the astonishing original city, the UNESCO designation left the impression of a Brasília frozen in time in the 1960s. The designation also focused attention on the city’s initial state-sanctioned art (almost exclusively made by privileged, white males), as opposed to the diverse, contemporary cultural expressions throughout the administrative regions of the DF.

Fig. 1.2

The Plano Piloto

(Map by Avian Ciganko-Ford, from U-Spatial at the University of Minnesota)

The central argument of this book is that Brasília’s reputation as a cultural wasteland is outdated. This book contends that twenty-first-century artists are recasting Brasília as a vibrant city of the arts in which cultural production affirms a creative right to the city . Various genres—poetry, prose, music , photography, cultural journalism, film, graffiti, street theater, and street dance—play a part in this transformed image of the city. Brasília’s cultural enterprise creatively demystifies the capital’s asymmetries and imagines alternative ways of inhabiting the city.

Critics return constantly to the flaws of the initial plan of Brasília as if a city were nothing more than its origin story (Markus 5). Yet as Henri Lefebvre, Doreen Massey, and David Harvey propose, cities are in continuous flux (Lefebvre, The Production 224; Massey 39; Harvey 23, 26). In hurling insults at Brasília, there is a tendency to forget that the residents of the capital, in their everyday practices and with their own voices, shape it (Certeau 98–100; Massey 118; Lefebvre, The Production 39). Over-emphasis on the story of the failure of the city’s plans has ignored problematically the racially and economically diverse artists, art consumers, and cultural producers who have transformed the DF.

The 1933 Athens Charter—Modernism’s urban planning manifesto—promised that “the soul of the city will be brought to life by the clarity of the plan,” but in Brasília the opposite is true (Congrès sec. 86 qtd. in Le Corbusier 101). The soul of the city becomes apparent in deviations from the plan, as contemporary artists exemplify. Especially in recent years, when Brazil’s democracy has stood on shaky ground, the DF’s contemporary artists have sought to disrupt status quo perceptions and uses of space in the capital.

In the face of stark inequity, contemporary DF art has brought residents together and transformed their image of their city. Brasília’s artists have always been active, but the capital’s contemporary art scene has demonstrated stronger ties to the city, enjoyed more funding, and been more inclusive of marginalized groups. The uptick in artwork focused on urban improvement and social justice may be attributed to various factors. Social media technology has made it easier to spread the word about art events. New technologies have made it more affordable to make certain art forms, particularly film , music, and books. Under the presidency of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (known as Lula), which ran from 2003 to 2010, the middle class expanded significantly and poverty was greatly reduced. With this expanded middle class (Class C), as Leila Lehnen conceives, “the urban periphery, ethnic minorities, and economically underprivileged segments of the citizenry—have begun to demand their right to substantive citizenship, often through ‘insurgent practices’ that occur not only in the social and civil sphere, but also in the cultural arena” (10–11). Increasingly, Brasília’s residents are demanding their right to make and consume culture and to do so in the public spaces of the capital.

Beyond the social demands and the rising middle class that spearheaded this transformation, new funding models have also helped to make Brasília’s art more inclusive. Looking at the logos on the back of almost any twenty-first-century DF art object (book, DVD, magazine, and so forth) discloses the funding sources—both public and private—that fuel this art. For example, the 2018 DVD Vera Veronika - 25 anos—celebrating the eponymous rapper’s career—lists sixteen corporate and governmental collaborators. In the twentieth century, this financing model simply did not exist in Brasília and performances, mimeographed books, and mixtapes were put together on shoestring budgets. The largest funding source, established in 1991, is the DF Cultural Aid Foundation (FAC-DF), run out of the DF’s Ministry of Culture. Since 2008, when the Legislative Chamber of the DF approved a new law, a minimum of 0.3 percent of the net current revenue (the sum of all the taxes collected by the DF’s treasury) had to go to FAC-DF projects, which artists compete for via grants. The Federal Cultural Incentive Law (Lei de Incentivo à Cultura), approved in 1991, is another major funding stream. It allows companies and individuals to deduct part of their income tax for cultural and artistic investments, and there is also a district-level equivalent law, the DF Cultural Incentive Law (Lei de Incentivo à Cultura Distrito Federal). This law has already made an appearance in fiction. In Almino’s novel O livro das emoções, a lawyer who specializes in obtaining Cultural Incentive Law funding appears in a meeting about a Brasília-based documentary. The lawyer’s presence exposes the fact that funding is not distributed purely to the most deserving, but to those with the wealth and connections to work the system most deftly. Yet the FAC-DF also strives to fund projects from across administrative regions. The increase in art connected to city improvement and social justice speaks both to the priorities of the funders and to the priorities of artists from marginalized groups who see their work as connected to activism, such as Vera Veronika’s songs about the rights of female, black, LGBTQ+, and peripheral residents.

For many of the artists discussed in this book, making art in and about Brasília is a form of keeping cultural traditions alive and transcending discrimination. For instance, the all-female rap group Atitude Feminina (formed in 2000), from the administrative region São Sebastião, was told by a local male rapper that their place was in the kitchen, not on stage (qtd. in Rezende, “Mulheres” 14). The insult underscores geographer Neil Smith’s argument that “not only is the production of space an inherently political process, then, but the use of spatial metaphors, far from providing an innocent if evocative imagery, actually taps directly into questions of spatial power” (62). Such experiences—which have inspired the group’s feminist lyrics—illustrate the continued struggle for spatial and social justice.²

Two critics have been particularly influential in capturing Brasília’s socio-spatial failures. The geographer Aldo Paviani began writing about Brasília in the 1970s, and he is best known for the critical editions he has edited about urban planning, housing, social injustice, inequity, and environmentalism in Brasília, which include contributions from urban studies scholars, sociologists, geographers, and anthropologists. With over four decades of scholarship on the DF, his work covers a wide range of periods, administrative regions, and topics. A constant throughout his work is a concern for the unjust treatment of the DF’s working-class residents. He documents their long commutes, substandard access to urban services, and lack of access to jobs near their homes, among other hardships. Paviani laments the capital’s “unjust and selective urbanization” (“Apresentação,” A conquista 180) and has often repeated his joke that the brasiliense is a being with a “head, torso, and wheels,” indicating how urban sprawl has made it difficult to navigate Brasília on foot (“Demandas sociais” 88).

Anthropologist James Holston’s The Modernist City —which is available in Portuguese translation—is, by far, the most influential scholarly text on Brasília, presenting the capital as a social catastrophe. But since the book was published in 1989, academics who draw heavily upon it frequently fail to recognize how the city has changed in the last three decades. Many analyses of Brasília written in English include more reiterations of Holston’s views than new arguments.³ The Modernist City focuses on how the Plano Piloto’s top-down, modernist master plan sought to make society more egalitarian, but ended up exacerbating social divisions. The master plan failed to take into account how Brazilians’ desires and customs would subvert it. Moreover, government officials failed to predict that the construction workers who built Brasília would want to stay there post-inauguration. With excellent comparisons to preindustrial city layouts an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. An Introduction to the Art of Brasília
• 2. A Historical Overview of the Art of Brasília
• 3. Brasília Unsettled in João Almino’s Cidade Livre
• 4. Creative Communion in Nicolas Behr’s Brasília
• 5. Ceilândia’s Art in Adirley Queirós’s Branco sai, preto fica
• 6. Poetry Slams and Brasília’s Legacy of Verse Competitions
• 7. Black Contemporary Brasília Poets’ Insurgent Books
• 8. Traços, Street Art, and Brasília’s Cultural Renaissance
• Back Matter