ABOUT
CONTACT
NEWS

PROJECTS


Brazil Builds and the possibility of a tropical modernism
Talles Lopes questions the attempt to establish a modern-country project through Brazilian architecture

By Mateus Nunes



Brazil Builds (2022), by Talles Lopes. Contar o tempo (Counting Time) exhibition. [Photo: Charlene Cabral]

Text originally published in Portuguese, on the Brazilian art magazine seLecT, in July 12th, 2022 [link].
Mateus Nunes is a writer, curator and researcher. Holds a PhD in Art History from Universidade de Lisboa (Lisbon, Portugal) and a BA in Architecture and Urbanism from Universidade Federal do Pará (Belém, Brazil). Guest Lecturer at Universidade de São Paulo (Brazil) and Professor at Museu de Arte de São Paulo (Brazil).


The Brazilian artist Talles Lopes, in his installationBrazil Builds (“Construção Brasileira”, in Portuguese) (2022), revisits Brazilian iconography and a photographic architectural tradition linked to a project to modernize the nation. Composed of printed and diagrammed photos on a metallic structure that combines orthogonal and curved elements, the installation also has a set of asbestos vases with plants commonly used in modern landscape projects in Brazil. The visual artist, graduated in Architecture and Urbanism from Universidade Estadual de Goiás, in 2020, recently joined the Delfina Foundation residency program, in London, with the support of the Inclusartiz Institute, and presented Brazil Builds at the group exhibition Contar o Tempo, at Centro Culturam MariAntonia (São Paulo, Brazil), in 2022.

The exhibition was structured around provocative and inquiring premises about the thought of time, based on the transdisciplinary arsenal available to tackle the problem in contemporary times, in addition to events that propose a review of the counting of that time in Brazil, such as the country's Bicentennial of Independence, and the Centenary of its Week of Modern Art (“Semana de Arte Moderna”), at Theatro Municipal, in São Paulo. The group exhibition brought together works by Adriana Moreno and Marina Zilbersztejn, Aline Motta, Carmela Gross, Clara Ianni, Diogo de Moraes, Dora Longo Bahia, Elilson, João Carlos Moreno de Sousa, Laís Myrrha, Marilá Dardot, Marcelo Moscheta, Rosana Paulino, Walmor Corrêa and the MAE USP Archaeological Center.

In the photos displayed in the installation, Lopes presents reverberations – or reappearances – of the characteristic columns that compose the main facade of the Palácio da Alvorada, in Brasília, designed by Oscar Niemeyer for the official residence of the presidency of the Republic of Brazil – in addition to being the first construction of reinforced concrete officially inaugurated in Brasília, in 1958. These elements, in the buildings researched by Lopes, reappear in colonnades of porches, balconies and marquises, balustrades and in ornaments applied or painted on external facade walls of what is read by a popular and non-erudite architectural expression – although clearly knowledgeable and attentive to important academicist architectural achievements.

Brazil Builds (2022), by Talles Lopes. Contar o tempo (Counting Time) exhibition. [Photo: Charlene Cabral] Brazil Builds (2022), by Talles Lopes. Contar o tempo (Counting Time) exhibition. [Photo: Charlene Cabral]

The integration of these elements – which have become iconic in Brazilian architecture, in the order of the canon or the treatise – in popular buildings demonstrates a kind of development of a tropical civilization, accentuating the discrepancies between the Eurocentric attempts of a modernist enterprise around the world and the effective unfolding of this project of modernity in the tropics. The reception – and operation – of these foreign traditions follow one another like a second wave coming to Brazil across the Atlantic, following in due proportions the first colonialist onslaught in the 16th century.

In his solid research, the artist collects photos through bibliographic and digital research, by receiving photos sent by people familiar with Lopes' research, and by photographs taken by the artist himself, mapping dozens of buildings that replicate the column in the five major Brazilian geographical regions. This image bank fuels – and haunts – Lopes' research in recent years. In the installation Brazil Builds, the artist chooses to present only photographs from Google Street View, intensifying the friction between images of different natures: a modern international, sold abroad by Brazil and vice versa; a local one, materialized in Brazilian streets; and a digital and globally connected one, guided by the dynamics also imported from a surveillance policy.

 
Untitled, image of a building in Bela Vista (MS), collected by the artist through Google Street View.


The photographs shown in the installation present an effective Brazilian construction, culturally hybrid, in an imagetical fusion between the tradition considered “erudite” and the popular practice. They revisit canonical symbols in architectural culture in a non-academicist way, incorporating these ostentatious marks of modernity in unofficial buildings. The artist makes the photos displayed in the installation have visual aspects similar to those that were part of the exhibition Brazil Builds: Architecture New and Old, 1652-1942, from 1943, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), provocatively alluding to an artificial construction of history.


Photos from the Brazil Builds exhibition at MoMA NY (1943).
Source: MoMA

The modern historiographical project imposed on Brazil privileged, through photography, the imagery display of a narrative construction that, at the same time that showed the solidity of the architectural traditions of certain countries, used this framework as a justification for the implementation of a project of modernity. Brazil, therefore, with “four centuries of history”, would be able to live a new phase in its civilization. In this way, photography was used not only as a symbol of modernity, but as an effective and easy institutional dissemination vehicle around the world of what supposedly happened in modern Brazil.

In addition to presenting the photos in a way similar to that shown in the historic exhibition Brazil Builds: Architecture New and Old, 1652-1942, from 1943, at MoMA, the artist uses the same typography in his work that tops the structure of the expography of the Brazilian Pavilion atExpo 58 (Brussels World's Fair in 1958). The official translation of Brazil Builds into Portuguese resulted in the name Construção Brasileira, which Lopes uses as the Portuguese title of his installation. In this work, the artist continues to use the citation of these historical events as a review tool: he also recreates the expographic project of the Brazilian pavilion of Expo 58, designed by architect Sergio Bernardes, which featured the column of Palácio da Alvorada – designed by Oscar Niemeyer – for the first time in a European exhibition.

George Everard Kidder Smith, responsible for most of the photographs shown in the exhibition and in the Brazil Builds’s catalog at MoMA, was an American architectural photographer, with a solid production on modernist architectural development in countries such as Sweden, Italy and Switzerland – to the Stockholm Builds exhibition, also at the MoMa (1941); and for the publications Switzerland Builds – Its Native and Modern Architecture (1950) and Italy Builds: Its Modern Architecture and Native Inheritance (1955), respectively. He was the author of Source Book of American Architecture: 500 Notable Buildings from the 10th Century to the Present, originally published in 1981, a kind of imagery compendium of buildings in the United States. It can be seen that the thinking, not only of Kidder Smith, but of other institutional protagonists of his time — such as Philip L. Goodwin, board member and curator of MoMA — sought to portray the modernization of different countries through architecture, incorporating – albeit narrowly – local specificities. Goodwin and Kidder Smith led the organization of the Brazil Builds exhibition in 1943.

Seaplane station, Areroporto Santos Dumont, Rio de Janeiro, Atilio Corrêa Lima, architect, 1940, photo by George Everald Kidder Smith in the catalog for the exhibition Brazil Builds (1943) at MoMA NY (page 151)

Lopes' work allows us to rethink the temporal arc established by the remarkable 1943 exhibition – which proposed a cut from 1652 to 1942 – and by its subtitle, which decreed that Brazilian architectural culture only began in the 17th century. This chronological section reiterates a colonialist view that despises the cultural, artistic and architectural traditions of the native peoples of Brazilian territory before the Portuguese invasion. The very modus operandi of photographer Kidder Smith, according to historian Robert Elwall, followed a classic speed of traveling artists and naturalists who, coming from abroad, sought to portray the fauna, flora, geography and people of Brazil in a vertiginous way, without paying attention to the heterogeneous Brazilian complexities. It even shares an ethnographic approach on photography, by portraying the territory of the other, as Felipe Augusto Fidanza and Pierre Verger did. Studies that share decolonial matrices – such as Brazil Builds, by Lopes – provide critical reviews regarding the temporal and evolutionary historiographical understanding, an epistemological model of European origin, which defends a linear accumulation of knowledge throughout history that would lead modern Western society to be more and more evolved.

Lopes aims to present a trustworthy Brazilian genealogy of the architecture of his country, which builds in a non-erudite way, replicates fads that serve as imagetic and social distinctions and brings together the erudite and the popular in an inseparable amalgam, rooted in the country's history. Would the history of Brazil begin, then, with the construction of the pillars of Palácio da Alvorada? This trans-historical vertigo is even purposely made by Lopes: the columns of the Palácio do Alvorada were built between 1957 and 1958, therefore outside the temporal arc delimited by the Brazil Builds exhibition, which included buildings until 1942. This confusion reaffirms the ineffectiveness of modern and positivist chronological models to analyze Brazilian cultural complexities, in addition to criticizing the establishment of stereotyped visual narratives based on a narrow exoticism linked to Brazil.

How to combine the potential for modern development with the exuberance and grandeur of Brazilian fauna? How to deal with this monumental and ornamental surplus – the name with which Lopes wisely baptized his work Monumental Surplus (“Excedente Monumental”), from 2022? Did Brazilian architecture propose a fusion between structure and ornament? Is the modern development plan concerned with sustainability and with the disposal of solid waste from its constructions, a problem that has long been resolved by Brazilian indigenous populations in their highly sustainable construction techniques? What, therefore, would sustainable development be if not a return to the understanding and time of the country's history, and not an incentive to promote modern industry? Lopes' work engenders, in multiple and rhizomatic questions, the shuffling of a history established as official with narratives always on the margins of historiography. In this way, a Brazilian imagery system is built based on historical colonialism, modernism and popular constructive practices, reiterating a hybrid Brazil.

In the Brazilian Builds installation, Lopes has several asbestos cement vases, designed by the Swiss designer Willy Guhl and produced in Brazil by the Eternit company. In the vases, the artist displays specimens of plants widely used in modern landscaping, in an operation of citation to the vegetation used in important publications and exhibitions of the time on modern architecture – such as Philodendron Burle Marx, peace lily, white anthurium and syngonium, used in the Brazil Buildsexhibition at MoMA, as possible props for a Brazilian flora.

Monumental Surplus (2021), by Talles Lopes [Photo: Ricardo Miyada]

The vases, with the shapes of parabolas, hyperbolas and rectangular prisms, suspended by discreet metallic supports, align themselves with the sinuosity and formal austerity of the aesthetic proposals for the architecture of Brasília. The images advertising the sale of this family of vases in Brazil present sketches of the facade of the Palácio da Alvorada in the background, with models whose names range from “Roman”, “Greek” and “Switzerland” to “ambient” and “tropical”. Creating a friction concerning the sinuosity of the curved line without necessarily entering into discussions about ornament in Brazilian modern architecture is one of the multiple issues engendered by Lopes in the installation.

Asbestos, a chemical component used in the construction of this type of vases and in an extensive range of civil construction products, was banned from trade in Brazil as of 2017, due to its high carcinogenic toxicity when inhaled. Therefore, we rethink how toxic are the practices linked to a hurried, forced modernity, based on unsustainable industrial production and extractive natural resource management. Subjecting themselves to practices of this nature can lead us to consider the price that these countries were willing to pay to implement an imported and harmful project of modernity in their structure.

How long will we repeat a problematic tradition, imagery and materially? The idea of “Brazil, a country of the future”, title of the book by Stefan Zweig originally published in 1941, and the idea that “Brazil has a huge past ahead of it”, as Millôr Fernandes claimed, clash. To understand the modern Brazilian architectural culture is to realize that decadence and development go hand in hand. Zweig defended Brazil as a land where civilization could develop peacefully after the traumas and blemishes of the Second World War, just as the European colonists found in Brazil, in the 16th century, their “New World”, and how the Brazilian government and the great extractive industries found in the Amazon pure developmental potential. Brazil is always a land of promise of dreams, gradually exhausted.

Lopes' work allows us to reflect on the oscillating and rhizomatic dynamics of the irradiating poles of artistic models, demonstrating that places can behave as a center and as a periphery at the same time, portraying an ambiguity inherent to contemporaneity and post-colonial dynamics. Brasília, for example, from a positivist and modern perspective, would be in a position on the periphery in relation to Europe, the center that established the guidelines that guided architectural modernism in a hegemonic way. At the same time, however, Brasília also established itself as a center, by radiating models resulting from Brazilian modern architecture to other cities that absorbed them. The images and aesthetic systems therefore cross the capital of Brazil, without being left unscathed by the operations and pluralities made in this movement, causing an untraceable reverberation that diffuses these images in a capillary way, at the same time that it receives them. This tug of war that pulls in both directions at the same time illustrates the cultural hybridisms that have guided Brazilian cultural production for centuries, without forgetting to denounce the imposition – sometimes subtle, other times wide open – of a Eurocentric ideological and iconological violence.