The other of the other
IPA - Institute for Public ArchitectureGovernors Island. New York City.
2023.
Interested in thinking about the export of an exotic image through the circulation of Brazilian architecture, as well as the relationship between the exoticism of a tropical modernism and the maintenance of colonial logics on Brazilian territory itself, "The other of the other" investigates, appropriates and reworks exhibition displays from shows such as Brazil Builds (1943, MoMA) and the Brazilian pavilion at the New York World's Fair (1939).
As an artist and inhabitant of central Brazil, I have sought to discuss how design and architecture were inserted into a regime of colonial occupation and exploitation of this territory under the premise of modernization. During the fall residency coordinated by the IPA (Institute for Public Architecture) on Governors Island, New York, I dedicated myself to thinking about how the commodified image of a modern and tropical Brazil, partially produced by architecture in the middle of the last century, may have resulted in the maintenance of colonial structures and narratives.
Living on Governors Island, I was able to investigate how this imaginary was partially produced in the context of New York through art, architecture and design exhibitions in different institutions during the 20th century. I visited archives and spaces related to my research in the city, including the park that housed the 1939 and 1969 World's Fairs, the New York Botanical Garden and especially the archives of the exhibitions at MoMA - The Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan and the collection of modernist models, posters and projects at the museum's site in Queens. Based on this research, I approached two fundamental episodes in the internationalization of modern Brazilian architecture in NYC, the modernist experience of the Brazilian Pavilion at the New York World's Fair (1939) designed by Oscar Niemeyer and Lúcio Costa, but especially Brazil Builds (MoMA, 1943), the exhibition of Brazilian architecture that internationally consecrated Brazil's modernist production.
To different extents, these two exhibitions were marked by state propaganda of the country as a continental territory on the verge of becoming a world power, but also by an appeal to its exotic characteristics through the strong presence of tropical plants within the exhibitions. If, on the one hand, the affiliation with Corbusian modernism attested to development along Western lines, on the other, the use of Brazilian flora appeared as a sign of domination and colonization of the tropical jungles by Brazil itself.
My hypothesis is that the fetish around a tropical stylistics, manifested in the excessive prominence of exotic plants in these exhibitions, was a symptom of a set of policies of colonization and territorial integration in the 20th century, of which modern architecture was the main representative. These policies were guided by an imaginary in which forests performed the representation of the "other", stigmatized along with their populations as savages and subject to Western domestication, while modernist architecture was institutionalized as the very representation of the supposed civilizing process.
Aggressive agricultural expansion and mineral extraction, the violent integration of non-white communities into the national project, plus the whole imaginary of jungle domination, were translated in New York in the exhibition of exuberant tropical plants alongside modern concrete and steel buildings. With the domestication of plants in these exhibitions, Brazil signaled the domestication of its own territory in its colonial project of national integration.
At the same time, this aesthetic appeal to subordinate nature seems to have permeated the historical racial violence in Brazil, when the domination of the "jungle" also meant the symbolic domination of those racially judged as "savages", the black and indigenous populations linked to the territories where these vegetations originated. As dissected by researcher Patricio Del Real¹, exhibitions such as Brazil Builds converged with the shared need between the Brazilian and US governments to present Brazil as a place where citizenship overcame racial prejudice, reiterating the violent logic behind racial democracy that reinforced racial violence as it narrated its existence.
Raising suspicions about an erasure operated by the convergence between state ideologies and architectural production, as the researcher² still identifies, Brazil Builds tells a story of Brazilian architecture deeply influenced by "the Negro slave, imported
from near-by Africa"³, however, all these racial references disappear when the exhibition enters "Brazilian modernity". Thus, as a kind of flawed act, it is likely that the racial democracy illustrated exotically in tropical plants has come to reveal to us the fragile foundations of the racial-tropical-modern harmony synthesized in this idea of modernity.
In this perspective, an ambiguous condition conflagrated in which Brazil and its architecture performed the "other" in relation to the "universalism" of northern-global production, insofar as its formalist and tropical aspect set it apart from the canons, while at the same time this same "other" architecture symbolized in the country the internal reproduction of the same logics of domination and exploitation perpetuated since Western thought. As a result of this relationship with the New York context, I carried out an intervention in the IPA room where I stayed throughout the process, thus confronting the private and domestic sphere (as well as my own individual condition), with the public, international and "universal" dimension common to the museums, fairs and narratives that I have addressed in my work. In this intervention I worked with a set of images and objects in the hope of formulating a response, an interlocution, or even a kind of parallel archive in relation to the official narratives produced and safeguarded in the city's archives.
In the midst of my investigations at the residency to produce "International Style" (2023), I recovered historical maps of Brazil and the USA, both a large panel comparing the territories of the two countries presented at the Brazilian pavilion at the New York World's Fair in 1939, as well as maps related to the March to the West (1938) in Brazil and Manifest Destiny in the USA, a mythology that legitimized the colonization waves of the Westward Expansion (1801-1861) in the North American country. Among the various possible meanings, the panel on the Brazilian pavilion resonates as a silent affiliation to a model of Yankee imperialism. The analogy between the territories may also have been an attempt to affirm Brazil's expansionist capacity, and therefore an imminent colonial logic. As if it wanted to gain any Western legitimacy, despite evidently being its other.
At the same time, some of the works propose an approach based on the displays in the Brazil Builds exhibition (MoMA, 1943). An installation features classic books from the bibliography on Latin American modernist architecture published in the USA and the UK. The books, the history of Brazilian architecture and also the heroic narratives of the great modernist achievements have their function altered, being used just like the pedestals in the Brazil Builds exhibition to display a tropical plant that is commonplace in Brazilian domestic life.
Inside the room, two large pedestals also refer to the displays used in Brazil Builds, where, curiously, the model of the iconic Capanema Palace (Rio de Janeiro, 1943) occupied a stand equivalent to the one used to present a plant customary in Brazil, a Burle Marx philodendron. The subtle analogy at the MoMa between the plant and the model resonates with a broader logic, the institution of Latin architecture as the exotic, a "savage" version in relation to the modern Western architecture of the period. In this sense, the specifc site in the room reenacts the displays, but raises the model and the philodendron close to the ceiling, in an attempt either to cancel direct visual contact with the objects, suspending this exotic narrative, or to highlight these historically constructed relationships, since the top of a high pedestal is also a prominent place.