Talles Lopes

Brazil Builds

Project for the exhibition Contar o tempo (Counting time). Maria Antonia University Center. USP - University of São Paulo.
2022

Brazil Builds
Installation. Metal panel, photographs and Eternit planters.
2020.

“[...] Palácio da Alvorada, Oscar Niemeyer’s project for the official residence of the presidency of Brazil republic, the first masonry construction inaugurated in Brasília, in 1958, in the midst of the euphoria of a developmental project.. [...] Enthusiasm manifested in the popular replication of the Palácio da Alvorada column in several vernacular constructions throughout Brazil. In the same year, the Brazil Pavilion was presented at the Brussels International Exhibition (cover image), displaying a model of modern tropical civilization, in which the construction of Brasília occupied a prominent place and a great image of the Alvorada Palace was shown to the world.

An graduated architec, Talles Lopes aligned these and other symbolic episodes in the presentation of his work Construção Brasileira (Brazil Builds, 2022),installation composed of a large metal panel with black and white photographs attached to it, accompanied by a garden with the usual plants of Brazilian landscaping. The species are planted in asbestos concrete pots from the 1960s, designed by Swiss designer Willy Guhl and manufactured by the company Eternit in Brazil.

According to advertisement in that time – also exposed in Lopes’ panel – the vases were inspired by the “architectural beauty of Brasília”; and in fact its clean and sinuous forms, and a game between weight and lightness, allow a visual relationship with the modernist project. The material, quite resistant and flexible, widely used as raw material for construction throughout the 20th century, is currently banned in Brazil and in several countries around the world because it is highly harmful when inhaled. Here, if we like, a dark metaphor appears about the euphoria that involve certain ways of producing development”