Abstraction Lies: Political Dissonance and Brasília’s Miniature Worlds
For his 2015 video installation Abstraction Lies, Brazilian artist Laercio Redondo used Bauhaus-style wooden toy blocks to create a miniature replica of the Congresso Nacional in Brasília (Figure 1). Designed by Oscar Niemeyer, the building sits at the pinnacle of the monumental axis of Brazil’s capital and is central to the city’s carefully constructed scenography (the abstraction). Brasília has long been framed as a daring experiment in modernist design (the lies). Yet as Paulo Tavares, Fernando Luiz Lara, Fabíola López-Durán, and Felipe Corrêa have argued, Brasília was structured to conquer Brazil’s most resistant frontier: the “wilderness” hinterlands and the Amazon basin. Obscured by the epic narrative of Brasília, then, is the fact that the project was first and foremost a means of reasserting state control over central and northwestern Brazil, a process that began in the 1930s with massive displacement of indigenous and traditional communities to accommodate hydroelectric plants and a national highway network serving the capitalist interests of national and international elites, especially those with high stakes in aggressive resource extraction.
Figure 1. Photograph of Laercio Redondo’s Abstraction Lies, 2015, at Dallas Contemporary, 2016. Courtesy of Laercio Redondo.
When I saw a photograph that circulated after the attack on Brasília’s iconic Praça dos Três Poderes [Three Powers’ Square] by a far-right mob on January 8, 2023, Abstraction Lies was the first thing that came to mind (Figure 2). The image, shot after the invasion by hundreds of pro-Jair Messias Bolsonaro rioters — a violent collective whose constituency spans class, race, and regional boundaries —, features a destroyed architectural model of the Congresso Nacional. Juxtaposing Redondo’s work with the photograph highlights the ambiguous relationship of this collective to Brasília, and to the ubiquitous representations of the city that deny its entanglement with exploitation and dispossession. It also provokes question about the right to the city, and the enduring role of the fiction of modernity in the Global South. This article explores these gaps by revisiting the history of Brasília and the role of modern architecture in developmentalist and neodevelopmentalist political projects since at least the 1950s.
Figure 2. Architectural model of Brasília’s Congresso Nacional destroyed during the invasion of the capital January 8, 2023. Photograph by Marcelo Camargo. Courtesy of Agência Brasil.
Brasília has long been controversial. The key to Brasília's image of futurity was — and remains — the purism of its architectural abstraction, and the belief that its symbolic force could usher in Brazilian modernity. Not everyone was seduced. In May 1958, critic Mario Pedrosa wrote in his column for Jornal do Brasil, the country’s largest newspaper, that Brasília was a closed world: an oasis amidst the large extension of the Brazilian territory that “the Portuguese occupied, artificially, planting along its vast extension, here and there, small urban nuclei in the jungle.” Yet as the country’s capital, Brasília could not remain an oasis, a “colony founded on an artificial basis. It should, on the contrary, be an anticipation of the future: a utopia.”
Brasília is an old idea. European settlers aspired to control and dominate the sertão [the backlands] and its peoples since the eighteenth century and the Constitutions of 1824, 1891, 1934, 1937, and 1946 anticipated a new interior capital. Then came the political will in the form of President Juscelino Kubitschek, who took office in 1956. He campaigned on a promise of rapid modernization (“Fifty Years in Five”), and Brasília was the lynchpin.
With his political program under immediate attack, he pushed hard to study the site, develop plans, and build. To make Brasília visible was central, and the agency set up to realize the city, NOVACAP [Companhia Urbanizadora da Nova Capital/Urbanization Company for the New Capital], became a massive propaganda machine. It hired photographers, graphic designers, model makers, artists, and journalists. And it promoted Brasília across the world by seeding newspaper spreads, promotional pamphlets, and exhibitions, including architectural models (Figure 3). Pointedly, these models reigned supreme; they were the most compelling means of mediation between the public and the yet-to-be-built city.
Figure 3. Exhibition of Brasília organized at the Ministério of Educação e Saúde (MES) by NOVACAP during construction. Courtesy of Arquivo Público do Distrito Federal.
Abstraction Lies subverts the propaganda of these models while highlighting the role that they played in generating the imaginary and tectonic realities of the city. Gaston Bachelard argued in The Poetics of Space that “values become engulfed in miniature, and miniature causes men to dream” because when one enters into a miniature world, one is liberated “from all obligations of dimensions, a liberation that is a special characteristic of the activity of the imagination.” The miniature is thus a world given to the viewer to grasp without having to be in that world. Interestingly, the same year that Bachelard’s book was published, 1958, Pedrosa, the critic, argued, too, for the importance of miniatures: as worlds that could be imagined and dominated, and as expectations of the future that are nevertheless complete. Brasília’s architectural models remain very much part of the Brazilian national imaginary and January’s photograph of the smashed miniature underscores the enduring power of model as symbol.
Redondo’s work projects a silhouette of a miniature Congresso Nacional that he created using toy blocks against a video of moving clouds. It is a montage that mobilizes the archetypal image of the city of Brasília made iconic through the photographs of Marcel Gautherot, René Burri, Lucien Clergue, Mario Fontenelle, and others, while exploring the building blocks of its rhetoric. It performs its title by presenting the capital as an abstraction: a reduction of the actual relationships between landscape, architecture, people, and everyday life. The lie is experienced as the silhouette hints at the experience of modernity while also precluding it.
“In the popular imagination, Brasília represents a dream of modernity predicated on resource extraction, violence, and exploitation.”
The installation is particularly witty in that it distills the image of Brasília to its underlining structure in front of the viewer and leaves its disassembled pieces, rendered in primary colors and effaced through projection, out for inspection. It reconstitutes the form of the city on the screen while denying the satisfaction of experiencing the skyline as typically depicted, as a unified composition. Abstraction Lies evokes this unity. But because it is truncated, it reveals a desire for the mediated, mythical Brasília — the one that claimed to tame the backlands and its indigenous and Black peoples — that models helped engender in the 1950s.
Interestingly, the mob that attacked the model left the actual buildings mostly undisturbed. They smashed up interiors, including furniture and art, and the glass façades that recede behind the buildings’ grand colonnades. But the white marble columns that have become the signature feature of the city and a national symbol of modernity and futurity remained largely intact (Figures 4 and 5). The collective that dominated in hidden interior corridors cowered in the shadow of Niemeyer’s iconic parabolas.
Figure 4. Brasília’s Praça dos Três Poderes following the January 8 insurrection. Photograph by Fabio Rodrigues-Pozzebom. Courtesy of Agência Brasil.
Figure 5. Rioters in front of the Palácio do Planalto [Presidential Palace] in Brasília on January 8, 2023. Photograph by Marcelo Camargo. Courtesy of Agência Brasil.
The dissonance between the impulse to destroy interiors yet stay clear of façades speaks of the separation between the imaginary of Brasília and its materiality. If the destroyed model suggested uncertainty and negotiation, the actual structures still seem to represent in the popular imagination a dream of modernity predicated on resource extraction, violence, and exploitation — one inseparable from coloniality and the country’s entrenched asymmetry of power.
From this perspective, attacking the miniature finds parallel in the exploitation of bodies and territories intrinsic to the myth of “unfinished” modernity that has long infected Brazil and anchors the neocolonial status quo that Bolsonaro’s supporters fight so fiercely to maintain. The miniature endures as the site of the lie of abstraction, but also as the model for its materialization in the world.
Citation
Alice Heeren, “Abstraction Lies: Political Dissonance and Brasília’s Miniature Worlds,” PLATFORM, Oct. 9, 2023
