XVII Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association

Art, Race, and the Construction of Space in Contemporary Brazil

Session Submission Type: Complete Panel

Abstract

This panel explores how visual artists contribute to the construction of space and race in Brazil since the mid-20th century. The construction of buildings and public spaces are deeply embedded in the articulation of racial democracy and the ensuing challenge to this myth. Since the mid-20th century, visual artists have probed how the built environment exhibits Brazil’s racial discourses, creating experimental artworks that reflect activism, international exchange, and the reclamation of land. Architects sometimes responded to this art and created buildings accordingly, which represented Brazil’s newly-forged relationships with West Africa as well as challenges to nationalist racial discourses. Art and architectural histories about race and space have been siloed, and this panel brings these fields together and argues that they must be in conversation to understand the stakes of architecture, space, race, and art since the second half of the twentieth century for the construction and depiction of Brazil's built environment.

Through object-based analysis and in-depth archival research, we contribute papers that reflect this stance. Paulina Pardo will examine how Letícia Parente’s articulation of citizenship in her flagship work Marca registrada (1975) has transformed this black and white video into a canonical artwork within national narratives of contemporary art. She argues that a historiographical approach to this singular work reveals its centrality for the reconceptualization of citizenship both during and after Brazil’s military dictatorship and specifically as this artwork was exhibited in two museums whose buildings are consider paradigms of Brazilian modern architecture, Rio de Janeiro’s Museu de Arte Moderna and the Museu de Arte Contemporânea at Universidade de São Paulo. Alice Heeren will examine the series Studies for Kama Sutra (2020-) by contemporary Brazilian artist Lais Myrrha. She argues that depicted as bodies that are folded, dismembered, penetrated, tipped over, and stood upon within innumerous sexually charged situations, Oscar Niemeyer’s iconic parabolic column for Brasília and its colonial predecessor–the column of the manor house at the Colubandê plantation–inhabit a peripheral, nonbinary, nonwhite, and picturesque scenery created by the folding of the Kama Sutra's charged landscape and Brasília, the epitome of Brazilian modernist architecture. Abigail Lapin Dardashti will explore the collaboration of Senegalese ambassador to Brazil Henri Senghor and Brazilian architect Wilson Reis Netto in the construction of the Senegalese embassy in Brasília. She argues that this building shifted Brasília’s landscape by incorporating design from ancient West African sites, focusing on Brazil’s African heritage rather than a Le Corbusian-inspired approach.

Hybrid session. Link: https://sdsu.zoom.us/s/81195446807

Sub Unit

• XVII Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• Diplomacy, Race, and African Architecture in Brazil’s Senegalese Embassy Building, 1964–1977 - Abigail Lapin Dardashti, University of California, Irvine

• Essentially Brazilian: Letícia Parente’s Trademark - Paulina Pardo Gaviria, California State University, Long Beach

• Studies for Kama Sutra: Brasília, the Colonial Plantation, and the Dream of Conquering the Brazilian Sertão - Alice Heeren, California State University, Stanislaus

• "Entre Participação e Segregação – o Pixo como intervenção literário-estética no espaço público” - Maëlle Karl, Freie Universität Berlin

Chair

• Alice Heeren, California State University, Stanislaus

Session Organizer

• Abigail Lapin Dardashti, University of California, Irvine