Talles Lopes

During my residency at Delfina Foundation (2022) in London, I dedicated myself to investigating a specific question that has been permeating my work for some time now: how did the Brazilian modernist program update and perpetuate narratives that befit the colonial heritages in Brazil, from buildings to its public debating platforms (such as publications and exhibitions)?

Thus, during the residency, I chose to research catalogs and archives of exhibitions that proposed to present the modernist production of Brazilian architecture to the global north in the mid-twentieth century. Searching collections such as Tate Britain, The National Archives, Whitechapel Gallery, RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects) and the Embassy of Brazil, archives of exhibitions such as Modern Brazilian Paintings (Royal Academy. 1943), Brasilia: the building of a new capital for Brazil (ICA London/1958), among others.




In this process, from the contact with the iconic image of a palm tree on the cover of the catalog of Brasilia: the building of a new capital for Brazil (1958), I turned my investigation to thinking about the relationship that vegetation established with architecture in publications and exhibition spaces. When visiting the images of
Brazilian pavilion at EXPO 58 (Brussels, 1958) available in the RIBA library archive, I paid attention to the way in which tropical plants competed with architectural photographs in the pavilion.

In parallel, after having contact with the research around the project "The Art of Diplomacy - Brazilian Modernism Painted for War", 2018, (investigation carried out by the Brazilian Embassy in London on the legacies in the UK of the exhibition Modern Brazilian Paintings, 1944), I identified that London had received from MoMA a series of architectural photographs previously presented in Brazil Builds (MoMA. New York, 1943). I returned to thinking about the relationship between these images and the vegetation in that first exhibition in New York, paying attention to the fact that the plants were presented on exhibition displays as well as the models, leaving the purely ornamental field to be inserted as an object of the exhibition.

The astonishing presence of a series of exotic vegetations in the global North, in exhibitions that proposed, fundamentally, to recount an idea of “Brazil”, seem to clash with the images of the transformations that were going on through that period in the country, such as the expansion of the agricultural frontier in the inner parts of Brazil and the progress of huge construction works like the Belém-Brasília highway. 




Thus, the appropriation of tropical plants at these exhibitions would be symptomatic of the neocolonial dynamics in Brazil at that time. Considering the fetish for the domestication of such species inside the planned spaces of modernist architecture, the argument of domination over anything or anyone considered savage was veiled. Perhaps those exhibition spaces tried to simulate the logic of the acclimatization gardens in Europe (Like Kew Botanical Gardens or the classic Crystal Palace), structures that not only adapted tropical species to the European cold weather but also symbolized the vast colonial domination through the diversity of species extracted from several territories. The Brazil which strived to adapt the modernist repertoire to the tropics also tried to come out as the Brazil capable of articulating its own acclimatization garden with species from its own territory, as a symbol of its auto-colonial corporation.

In this sense, during my period at Delfina, I began to study a possible subtraction of the architectural references present in the photographic records of these exhibitions without intervening in the presence of vegetation in the spaces, trying to delineate how the presence of these elements occurs not as an exhibition arbitrariness, but as an element central to the maintenance of a given narrative. This process has led to a series of works, including Brazil builds (2022) and Acclimatization Garden (2022).