In my April 16 column on Rádio USP, I discussed SP-Arte 2018 and highlighted Brasília (2018), a work by artist Bruno Faria. Bruno worked with Belo Horizonte’s Galeria Periscópio Arte Contemporânea and took part in SP-Arte’s “Solo” section, reserved for galleries interested in developing projects focused on a single artist. To the Biennial pavilion, where the fair has taken place for years, he brought an old, battered, rusty and dusty Brasília car dating from its launch in 1973.
The car was displayed on a rotating platform of the kind typical of auto shows, and on one wall of the booth the artist hung Volkswagen do Brasil’s launch advertisement. “It was much easier to buy the car than to find the ad,” says Bruno, who spent months researching magazines from 1973 at the Mário de Andrade Library and then hunted through secondhand bookshops for an issue of Manchete from that year containing the advertisement displayed in the booth.
In tune with the military government’s chauvinism, the advertising slogan declared: “Brasília — No better idea has come along.” The car was one of the company’s first designs developed outside its home country and, as the ad copy makes clear, was intended to reflect the boldness of the then ultramodern capital, which was 13 years old. It was presented as a robust, efficient product, like everything Germany had always made, but adapted to Brazilian driving conditions, with all the qualities of VW engineering, endorsed by a “brand that knows our ground.”
This veritable cocktail of signs in the advertising copy translates the context of the Brasília’s 1970s launch, the ideology of “Brazil as a great power” that marked the “Brazilian economic miracle” (1967–1973), a period remembered for strong GDP growth, soaring inflation and increased concentration of income and social inequality.
But seeing a Brasília station wagon falling apart today, in the middle of the lobby of a modernist building, at an art fair, at the height of the crisis we are experiencing, is disconcerting.
After all, Brasília — the capital, not the car — was at one point, at least as a project, a utopia, from the macro scale of the Plano Piloto to the micro scale of its superblocks. A debate between professors Guilherme Wisnik and Pedro Fiori Arantes, organized by Serrote magazine and available online, discusses this subject and the exhaustion of that urban model. Yet the unease provoked by Bruno Faria’s Brasília car is of another order. It is an image of total decay, economic and social. It translates viscerally what we are living through. To paraphrase Bruno, I would say: Brazil — no better portrait has come along.
Bruno Faria
SP-Arte
Niemeyer, Lucio Costa and Brasília, by Guilherme Wisnik and Pedro Fiori Arantes (video 4)
The Brazilian Economic Miracle
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