Rethinking the Country of the Future: Brasília through the Gaze of Contemporary Art

• In Event: Late modern architecture in Latin America

Abstract

This paper examines the period between the presidential campaign of 1955 when Juscelino Kubitschek first mobilized the dream of a new Brazilian capital and the moment the city of Brasília began to be built in 1956 through the work of contemporary artists that revisit the material culture of this moment. I focus on a composite map widely circulated in governmental, architectural, and popular publications starting in 1955 that became symbolic of the Brazil of the future. Topographic, political, and demographic maps of the country were juxtaposed to create a composite that was cross-sectioned by straight black lines that radiated from a small black circle. The circle marked the place designated for the construction of the future capital, while the black lines marked the government’s plan to construct highways leaving from Brasília to every corner of the Brazilian territory. In this map, a new visualization of Brazil as a territory, the radiating lines bind the country together, pulling the borders towards the illusory center of the nation: Brasília. Contemporary artists such as Clarissa Tossin and Nicolas Behr revisit the visual rhetoric of this period by manipulating the map, the imagining and construction of the new capital city, and the process of mapping the territory of Brazil and Brasília. My argument is that these contemporary renegotiations of the material culture of Brasília are attempts to examine critically the ideal of Brazil as the country of the future and the role of the Modern Architectural movement as the ultimate symbol of this myth.

Author

• Alice Heeren Sabato, Southern Methodist University