Remanso
Remanso (2017), installation views. With works by João Modé, Ale Gabeira and Raisa Curty. Catalogue texts: João Paulo Quintella and Laila Melchior
Hard Labor, or a construction to occupy
Laila MelchiorThinking about Remanso involves meditating on a gesture of occupation: the creation of a quiet space in the middle of one of the most important avenues in the Brazilian Republic, one that concentrates the country’s institutional headquarters. If reinforced concrete is a metonym for Brasília then so are politics and bureaucracy. Though it is quite surprising that in this city’s imagery, a place whose demonym became known by the name of those who built it, workers are not as present as other elements.
“Remanso is the cessation of movement, it is quietness”, says the exhibition text, but Remanso is also a work that talks about work [*] – rather, Remanso consists of two pieces of artwork, since the proposal to occupy the marquee combines the installations Feira Livre (Street Market), by João Modé, and Alvorada Nordestina (Northeastern Dawn), by Ale Gabeira and Raísa Curty. Remanso talks about work, but not in a metalinguistic sense. Rather, it deals with a dimension that goes beyond the domain of work as a driving force, embracing the worker, his trails, his legacy and, above all, his need to rest. Fundamental to those who work, the resting spot occupies a space in the middle of Eixo Monumental (the Monumental Axis) with Remanso’s shadows and hammocks.
The visibility of work and worker is a question that touches upon Brasília’s modernist project in a particularly delicate way. By recruiting workers from the northeast of Brazil, later known as candangos [1], Brasília ended up relegating them to “mere workforce”, not only failing to incorporate preferences and tastes of those who built the city, but also, and most importantly, denying any possibility of an organic and spontaneous flourishing of those elements. The modernist ideal of erasing archaic features (which encompassed the more traditional lifestyle of the Brazilian countryside) followed the machine-paced rhythm of construction. Finally, when the machine no longer worked unceasingly to erect buildings, Brasília pushed the workers and their baggage away from the plan2 and from the scene.
Hammock weaving and testing at Sitio Taboado. Boqueirão, State of Paraíba, 2017
The issue is what is present in the scene and what remains out of it. A matter of figure-ground perception: whoever sees the modernist Brasília does not see the candanga city. And yet they both are part of the same scheme, one that reverses what is in the foreground and background. This game, typical of modernism, can also be seen in the figure-ground diagrams showing aerial views of a city’s built and unbuilt spaces. According to anthropologist James Holston in his ethnography of the Brazilian capital, “In the preindustrial city, streets read as figural voids and buildings as continuous ground. In the modernist city, streets appear as continuous void and buildings as sculptural figures” [3].
Athos Bulcão’s tiles almost intuitively illustrate this sculptural character and the typical inversion of the traditional figure-ground relation at the core of the modernist project. His geometric- patterned tiles that cover Brasília’s architecture are frequently highlighted by the dialogue they establish with constructivist approaches to Brazilian art [4]. However, the game proposed by Bulcão’s panels could also be regarded as a unique interpretation
of the shape of Brasília’s buildings and other urban forms as seen from above, reproducing, on another scale, the relation of buildings and empty spaces in the park-city. Among Bulcão’s works, Ventania (Windstorm) panel [5] dialogs with the dynamics of work as the source of aesthetic effects. This panel, displayed in the Salão Verde (Green Room) at Câmara dos Deputados (House of Representatives), is made of four pieces—three of them with blue geometric figures and one of them completely white—that are further interpolated. The story told about the construction of this panel is that the author would have asked the workers to apply them randomly, respecting only a certain proportion of white pieces to colored pieces. Despite some degree of alienation on the part of the workers in putting together the panel, it is interesting to see how this collective work acquires a poetic sense in its truthfulness, bringing together the work and the power of the wind, which, to the same extent that disrupts things, rearranges them in a surprising and unexpected way.
Regarding the dynamics of what is shown and what is kept hidden in the materiality of Brasília’s buildings and streets, I can think of two images from the construction of the city that, despite depicting similar situations, do so in very different ways.
Marcel Gautherot. Ministries under construction, 1958.
The first image is a photograph taken by Marcel Gautherot during the construction of the city in which we see three building frames [6] at a distance. Partly inspired by the atmosphere surrounding the unfinished buildings, but also by the great distance between them, a feeling of void is accentuated by the haze effect applied to the image. The three giants emerge right above the construction site, with barely visible bases, in the middle of what seems to be a cloud of dust and debris from the construction mixed with the dry dust of cerrado (savannah). In the foreground, hard and crisscrossed shadows, such as those we see in the building frames, indicate yet another building frame, located behind the photographer. The few visible workers, looking tiny, appear in between plans, midway between the buildings and the shadows that are the protagonists of the image.
The second image can be seen in the documentary Primeiras Imagens de Brasília [7] (Brasília’s first images), produced by Atlântida Cinematográfica to record the city’s first years. Among early images of Brasília’s construction and people, we see workers laying out pieces of rebar in the structure of
a building—similar to the one we see fully erected in Gautherot’s picture. “Labor is unaware of the night”, says the narrator in a voiceover. We then see a nocturnal birth scene in the new city; the scene cuts to the construction site again. Workers are shown under low light, at dusk, welding the frames of a building while the narrator praises this practice of “baseball with red-hot iron”. We see the light produced by their working tools and their barely visible silhouettes between pieces of rebar against the darkening sky. The luminous trace of their work is recorded in motion as we see fire sparks coming out of their bodies against the light. These luminous bodies become metaphors of the workforce’s inherent poetry.
First images of Brasilia. Brasilia, 1957. 10 minutes. Federal District's Public Archives.
At Eixo Monumental (the Monumental Axis)—where Funarte is located and, consequently, its marquee, occupied by Remanso’s installations—the architectural scale is unique. Lucio Costa named it “Monumental” [8]. The monumental scale would “represent the symbolic and representative spaces of the country’s national capital. Covering the area from Praça dos Três Poderes (Three Powers Square) to Praça do Buriti (Buriti Palace Square)—office of the district government” [9]. But isn’t it symptomatic that Brasília’s symbolic spaces do not reflect the more traditional Brazilian lifestyle?
We then discover that Remanso is also about politics, after all. In other words, it is a very unique form of politics that, in the flexibility of pieces of canvas and fabric blowing in the wind, is opposed (or at least a complement) to the modern concrete. It suspends the bodies, the work, the time, and, with this movement, makes something visible as a figure. Something that, for now, survives only as background.
[*] Translator’s note: In Portuguese, work means both labor and the outcome of it.
[1] According to Michaelis Dictionary, the word candango has four meanings: 1) The name by which the Africans addressed the Portuguese; 2)
A despicable, vicious person, a crook; 3) Manual worker from outside a region; 4) The name used to designate the common workers that have helped to build Brasília”.
[2] I refer to Plano Piloto (Pilot Plan) both as the planned urban area architectonically idealized according to modernist precepts and built as a result of a national competition won by Lucio Costa (that does not include the peripheral satellite cities, nor other surrounding cities), as well as the political plan that unfolded after the city’s inauguration and that greatly diverged from the architects’ utopian intentions for the city.
[3] HOLSTON, James. The modernist city: an anthropological critique of Brasília. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 1989. p. 125.
[4] COCCHIARALE, Fernando. Apresentação da exposição Athos Bulcão: uma trajetória plural. 1998. Rio de Janeiro: CCBB, 1998.
[5] BULCÃO, Athos. Ventania. Tile panel measuring 3,90 x 79,70m, displayed in the Salão Verde (Green Room) at Câmara dos Deputados (House of Representatives), Brasília. Ci. 1971.
[6] GAUTHEROT, Marcel. Ministérios em construção. Brasília, 1958. Acervo do Instituto Moreira Salles.
[7] MANZON, Jean. Primeiras imagens de Brasília. Brasília, 1957. 10 minutos. Acervo do Arquivo Público do DF.
[8] Lucio Costa defined four scales to design Brasília’s urban plan. In addition to the Monumental scale, which is explained in the text, Brasília was designed with the following scales: Gregarious (North and South Entertainment, Business, Bank, Culture, Hotel, Hospital, Office, Radio and Television Areas); Residential (superblocks, including residential areas; local businesses; and landscape); and Bucolic (distinguished by large areas of green space that have shaped the park-city). Cf. KUBITSCHEK, Juscelino.
Por Que Construí Brasília? Rio de Janeiro: Editora Bloch, 1975.
[9] Idem.
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