Readers acquainted with architecture and its master narratives around the globe are aware of Brasilia and its “Plano Piloto” (Master Plan). The Project envisioned by Lucio Costa and engraved into the Cerrado landscape by Oscar Niemeyer is indisputably considered a watershed by modernist enthusiasts and by its detractors. No one denies that it has been a powerful experiment of imagination. Designed to cope with the future, the Plano Piloto is an intervention towards utopia: to make Modernity tangible by producing a grid for both space and time. More than 60 years have passed since the Plano Piloto project was first sketched, and many lives have experienced the effects of this modernist matrix on their bodies and minds. How have their notions and emotions been influenced by what was intentionally planned to shape them? Despite the amount of thought invested the Plano Piloto’s leading role in rational urban living, there is a consensus about the fact that preserving this almost immaculate modernist world heritage site has led to segregation. Instead of talking about space, I will focus on the notion of time, a lesser discussed but nevertheless central analytical framework for understanding how Brazil’s capital city functions until today as a laboratory where future forms of living are built. My source of inspiration is some recent art projects developed by two filmmakers, Dácia Ibiapina and Adirley Queirós whose main concern is the racism and segregation that pervades this modernist city.
A state project like building the Plano Piloto was meant to flourish only insofar as it could be built on an empty surface, on a place without history and, therefore, timeless. However, how did such a colonial idea of a terra nullius become a credible fact in a place where indigenous peoples have been living since time immemorial? Violence and death has guaranteed the ideological production of a No Woman’s Land: a desert built upon destruction. The annihilation of indigenous peoples and the enclosure of a territory as private property were the fundamental pillars of a governmental policy to attract newcomers to the Eldorado in the end of the 1950’s. Land expropriation across the country and the eviction of rural people in the sixties provided a population “willing” to occupy the country’s future capital city. The migratory influx to Plano Piloto was immediately fabricated as creating a demand for land and housing that was more than the government could supply.
The political construct of a human outpouring was built through public campaigns designed to attract this population from the countryside to the new capital as a strategy consisting in diverging the increasing migratory influx to the former capital of Rio de Janeiro, and to the industrial belt surrounding São Paulo. In order to cope with this “flood of people” throughout the dictatorship period (1964-1985), local governments appointed by the military devised a technology, a sort of grammar, that was naturalized by both public employees dedicated to housing policies, and people demanding a plot where they could build a shack or a proper house. As a grid on the top of the architectural grid, the classificatory system adopted by the government created a legitimized way of measuring each family’s “merit” with regards to settling in Brasilia. Of the many socioeconomic criteria for ranking the postulants, one in particular deserves attention: the fact that for any person to register for any social policy waiting list, she had to prove her “tempo de Brasilia”, in other words, had to prove that she had been living in Brasilia for at least 5 years without a house. Those who provided documented proof that they had been living in Brasilia “against all odds”, had sufficient merit to be classified and ranked on a list meant to hierarchize needs, especially the urgency of a roof over their heads.
Increasing demands for shelter have been addressed by successive governments as the so-called Satellite-Cities mushroomed: settlements approximately 30 kilometers away from Plano Piloto connected to Brasília by only a few radial roads and an extremely precarious public transportation system. Throughout the decades, new cities have been used as an ideologically unsuspected strategy to keep the unplanned but necessary poor population hidden away. At the same time, building these cities has been a lucrative business for contractors providing services for the state. The current population of public employees and high-level officials from relatively wealthy backgrounds in the Plano Piloto comprises 220,000 people, while the Satellite-Cities around it hold almost 3 millions. Only 7.75% of the population of Brazil’s capital city actually lives in the Plano Piloto today. The Satellite-Cities have become a belt of sheds that house the necessary work-force to supply the prize winning planned urban space of the Plano Piloto.
Formulae to calculate legitimacy and priority were a fundamental technology for building a society from “scratch.” Everyone arriving in Brasilia had a previous history that had been played out in incommensurable contexts, so, how to compare so many utterly diverse experiences? Furthermore, how to transfer social practices that had a history in other parts of the country without killing them in the transplantation?
Brasilia has created this kind of dilemma for a wide range of social practices where meaning resided in a span of time. Lets us take Ana as an example, a woman who was chosen as Brasilia’s first local candidate for Miss Universe in 1960. Beauty contests are traditionally built around the idea that a beautiful woman contained the spirit of her original place, in other words, from where she was born. The impasse in this case was how to grant this young woman legitimacy in a dispute against others whose biographies were deeply connected to the place they were representing if she had not been born in the emerging capital? Ana’s case is telling of a foundational dilemma that was “solved” by an on-going escalating production of different and detailed criteria that determined who belonged and who did not. A solution that paved the way to the widespread belief that “tempo de Brasilia” was a legitimate scale for measuring the merit of those fighting to be recognized as part of the planned city with no citizens.
In her recent documentary, filmmaker Dácia Ibiapina conducted a visual research on beauty contests in the Plano Piloto and its numerous surrounding cities that are the Satellite-Cities named as if their only purpose was to orbit the capital. By following the daily routine of some of the candidates, Dácia shows us how young working class black women born and raised in the periphery diverged from the wealthy white candidates representing rich neighbourhoods in Brasilia, like the Plano Piloto itself or the “mansion sector” around the artificial Lake Paranoá.
After accompanying the contest for some months, the director and her crew came to an intriguing turning point when they witnessed a fraud: in a peripheral satellite-city a young beautiful woman is chosen despite the fact that she does not live there. She and her supporters had doctored her documents to fake her belongingness to the Satellite-City. The candidates from the Satellite-City thought they were somehow protected by the generally accepted rule that established time of residence as a way to keep out opportunists, people who wouldn’t set foot in their poor streets but who wouldn’t bat an eye to do so if it meant becoming a Satellite-City Miss. They were furious and frustrated, their own bodies causing them to doubt their value: the woman who won, like many others from privileged neighbourhoods, was less black, less curly, less curvy and therefore more beautiful than them. What the winner and her acolytes did was illegal, no doubt. Yet they made a point: beauty in Brasilia is as segregated as anything else.
The most recent Miss Universe contest has been widely talked in the local media. A black woman won the local contest for the first time. Nevertheless, it is a step forward that reinstates the debate on segregation, formulae, and the criteria for calculating belongingness and its counterpart: scam. 2015 was the first year that the sine qua non condition of living in the city the young woman represents was abolished. The winner, Amanda, competed for a Satellite-City, although she lives in the Plano Piloto. The 20-year-old psychology student at the prestigious University of Brasilia won a contest that short-listed twenty-three of four-hundreds candidates to be “trained [sic] in etiquette, behaviour, posture, fashion and body care.” According to the organizers she won because “besides being tall and beautiful, she has the appropriate behavior and education for being a Miss.”
The men who planned Brasilia might have never thought about the nefarious effects their modernist technologies for optimizing time and space would have on bodies and minds. Fifty-five years separate Ana from Amanda. Racism in Brazil is being discussed nowadays in ways unimaginable when Ana was “elected” Miss in 1960. Nevertheless, Amanda’s consecration clearly reveals the discretionary way privileged people produce segregation: by changing the rules in their favour insofar as they keep their position of choosing between the misfits and those who can pass, who can cross the borders.
In Branco Sai, Preto Fica (2015), a recent science-fiction movie by Adirley Queirós, a black man who runs a pirate radio station from his peripheral house needs a passport to go to the Plano Piloto, otherwise he won’t get through the checkpoints surrounding the modernist citadel. He needs the passport and a visa to accomplish a mission. This man, sentenced to life in a wheelchair as the result of a police attack on a black music ballroom, gathers what is most powerful in his life to challenge the oppressive surrounding world: sound. Music is inspirational to the human uprising he is building with his friends. Like people, music can theoretically be framed into a spatial and temporal grid. However, its existence and meaning goes far beyond any incarceration. He does not take for granted that segregation is real in his quest to destroy it. Thus, he comes up with a surreal strategy to dismantle the ideological machine that produces Brasilia’s modernist segregation: a “sound-bomb” with every uproar he and his friends could record from their lives, houses, and streets: fanfare, cry, blast, shouting, drumming, heralds, songs. As he waits for the day he has enough sound-energy to implode the Plano Piloto, he reaches out to his beloved over the radio waves with spells and whispers and funky grooves. Their desire to be together is a wish to be free — from racism, spatial segregation, and state violence. Freedom is the where and when they want to live in.
Until today the preservation of Brasilia’s modernist planning sustains every action that resembles open fire against a group of b-boys in a black music nightclub. A segregated city lives in every scam created to avoid the contortions and stink that a fish out of water might cause on a stage meant to celebrate “beauty and etiquette,” and hide violence, racism, and segregation.
In both films beauty and music are sublime weapons used to disassemble a nefarious and violent reality built by those who feel entitled to segregate into temporal and spatial brackets those historically built as “misfits” or inadequate, keeping them in the past and at the outskirts, disposing of their lives in capricious ways What is acted out in both artistic works are alternatives to a master narrative that has put its spell on us, the admirers of Niemeyer’s modernist project, unconscious of its hidden racist foundation and the persistent obliteration of indigenous and blacks who do not fit into the Plano.
