The show is a particular sensitivity to space, to architecture, to the actual exhibition site, its physicality and specificities. We employed different methods to question architectural spaces conceived to promote Brazilian Modernism abroad, exporting an image of modernity. Brazilian modernism affiliates to the generic and universalist architecture based on ideas of growth that took the form of precast concrete, sectorization of the cities, favoring the creation of ghettos or enclaves of equals and designed for private transport. Therefore, a decontextualized architecture, without any roots in the Brazilian identity and traditions. 

Casa do Brasil was built by the Brazilian government to house Brazilian students in the city of Madrid, in 1959 – during the last years of democracy in Brazil, five years before the coup de état. It represented the avant-garde current in the Complutense’s Campus, reflecting the Brazilian Modernist Architecture carried out by Niemeyer and Lúcio Costa.

In La Piedra Pregunta, La Tierra Responde. Diálogos Sobre Arquitectura Sin Rastro, we highlighted some of the characteristics of Brazilian Modernist Architecture such as monumentality and permanence, and contrast them to other construction practices, such as those that center environmental and ecological sensitivity. 

The exhibition consists of three installations, two videos, six paintings and was curated by Amelie Aranguren and Cristiana Tejo.

SERPENTARIO, 2020

mixed media on ceramic wall, 700 x 400 cm

Through Serpentario, a large wall installation of natural materials, we explored practices of ancestral construction and techniques, consisting of technical knowledge linked to nature and in tune with the social and symbolic skills of the Native peoples of eastern South America.

LA PIEDRA PREGUNTA, 2020

cardboard, soil, sand, seeds, incense, bamboo and an audio track, 210 X 145 cm

It is a sound installation that narrates the violent foundation of a village in the Brazilian badlands. A story that has been repeated around Brazil, it addresses the forced miscegenation of indigenous populations and the colonizers, the abuse of Native indigenous women by the European patriarchy.

The story narrators are an elderly couple of Carnaúba dos Dantas, descendants of Micaela, the indigenous woman who was abused by Lieutenant Colonel Caetano Dantas Correia. 

CITY VIEW, 2020

cardboard, sand, soil and clay on glass window, 250 x 150 cm

The installation is an invitation to envision a ruined city of modern buildings  and  streets,  intended  to  reduce  urban  space  to  its essence, easily readable and writable from above. We tried to provide a city that exist within everyone’s mind, which opens out uncontrollably to access faraway and close by realms of time and space simultaneously. 

We like to think this model as a ‘city of the future-past’, anchored in a generic paradigm of development, this unsustainable and unfair paradigm of growth. 

WATER WESTERN, 2020

video projection on cardboard, 160 x  40 cm 

[16mm film transferred to digital file]

This film, made in collaboration with Caitlin Horsmon, is a sort of western created by the movement of the waters and the stillness of the fountain figures: horses, men, guns, Native people… Highlighting questions about land use and water – the most valuable commodity in the desert Western US. 

February – May 2020, Casa do Brasil, Madrid, Spain