People from outside of Brasília often dismiss Brazil’s capital as socially divided, boring, corrupt, and emotionally cold. Apparently its founders created not a vibrant capital, but a cultural wasteland. However, as Sophia Beal argues, Brasília’s contemporary artists are out to prove the skeptics wrong. These twenty-first-century artists are changing how people think about the city and animating its public spaces. They are recasting Brasília as a vibrant city of the arts in which cultural production affirms a creative right to the city. Various genres—prose, poetry, film, cultural journalism, music, photography, graffiti, street theater, and street dance—play a part. Brasília’s initial 1960s art was state-sanctioned, carried out mainly by privileged, white men. In contrast, the capital’s contemporary art is marked by its diversity, challenging norms about who has a voice within the Brasília art scene. This art demystifies the capital’s inequities and imagines alternative ways of inhabiting the city.
Beal
The Art of Brasília jetzt bestellen!
Weitere Infos & Material
1. An Introduction to the Art of Brasília.- 2. A Historical Overview of the Art of Brasília.- 3. Brasília Unsettled in João Almino’s
Cidade Livre.
- 4. Creative Communion in Nicolas Behr’s Brasília.- 5. Ceilândia’s Art in Adirley Queirós’s
Branco sai, preto fica
.- 6. Poetry Slams and Brasília’s Legacy of Verse Competitions.- 7. Black Contemporary Brasília Poets’ Insurgent Books.- 8.
Traços
, Street Art, and Brasília’s Cultural Renaissance.- 9. Epilogue.
Sophia Beal is an Associate Professor of Portuguese in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies at the University of Minnesota, USA. Beal is the author of
Brazil under Construction: Fiction and Public Works
(Palgrave Macmillan 2013) and co-editor (along with Bruce Robbins and Michael Rubenstein) of
Infrastructuralism
, a special issue of
Modern Fiction Studies
, published in 2015. The Portuguese translation of
Brazil under Construction
was published in 2017. Since May 2015, she has been an International Collaborator of the Contemporary Brazilian Literature Research Group, a Brazilian federally-funded initiative. She earned her PhD in Portuguese and Brazilian Studies from Brown University and was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Tulane University in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese.
