XVII Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association

Studies for Kama Sutra: Brasília, the Colonial Plantation, and the Dream of Conquering the Brazilian Sertão

• In Event: Art, Race, and the Construction of Space in Contemporary Brazil

Abstract

In the series Studies for Kama Sutra (2020-), contemporary Brazilian artist Lais Myrrha appropriates the parabolic column designed by Oscar Niemeyer for Brasília’s architectural program and places it in dialogue with the legacy of the Colubandê plantation to highlight colonial matrix of power in Brazilian contemporary society. In this paper, I argue that in Studies for Kama Sutra Myrrha instrumentalizes Niemeyer’s column to remediate precisely what it was built to represent: the fiction of modernity and its utopian narrative of universality and progress through reason, while bringing attention to another side of this rhetoric. Depicted as bodies that are folded, dismembered, penetrated, tipped over, and stood upon within innumerous sexually charged situations, the role of the Alvorada column as protagonist of the fiction of modernity is placed in the same axis as Brazilian colonial history. In these small-scale gouache on paper works, Niemeyer’s iconic column and its colonial predecessor inhabit a peripheral, nonbinary, nonwhite, and picturesque scenery created by the folding of the Kama Sutra narrative and its colorfully charged landscape and the epitome of Brazilian modernist architecture. The situations the bodies are involved in Studies for Kama Sutra and the columns’ unmistakably phallic and monumental registers within the intimate and fantastical space of miniature paintings, suggest the interpenetration and imprinting of one form onto the other—but especially of one body upon another—and of the bodies they have come to represent within a social imaginary.

Author

• Alice Heeren, California State University, Stanislaus