The official history tells that Brasilia was born from a collective dream: the dream of then-president Juscelino Kubitschek to give Brazil a new capital, a planned city with the sole purpose of becoming the axis of political and economic power, providing a boost of industrialization and development to the neglected central and northeastern regions of the country. Inspired by the dream of Catholic priest Don Bosco, who predicted the exact location where the city would be built a century and a half earlier. The dream of architects Lucio Costa, Oscar Niemeyer, and Roberto Burle Marx, who respectively designed, constructed, and landscaped the Plano Piloto, whose layout in the shape of a cross extended its north and south wings, poised like an airplane, over the central plateau of the Cerrado landscape. The dream of the “candangos,” workers who came from every corner of Brazil, who painstakingly built its buildings, parks, and avenues, in just three years, and dreamed of inhabiting it. Brasilia was born from a necessary dream as a symbol of national unity, a monumental and futuristic city focused on the ideals of order and progress of the modern republic. Inaugurated on April 21, 1960, Brasilia replaced Rio de Janeiro as the capital city and seat of the government of the Federal District. But soon the utopia revealed its reality. The symbolic city, the only World Heritage Site built in Latin America in the 20th century, had been conceived from less humanistic dimensions, based on models in line with the development of the automotive industry, with distances difficult to cover on foot, and enormous blocks of steel and concrete that rose majestically over kilometers of asphalt. The “candangos,” its first inhabitants, were immediately excluded to the satellite cities, and a wave of public officials and political leaders occupied the offices and residential areas of the new city.

Nicolas Behr is considered the most active representative of a generation of young people from Brasilia who, in the 1970s, dared to question philosophical and sociological issues that underlay the very inception of the city through their art. Through formal freedom and the simplicity of everyday life as a theme, his work focuses on the city as a backdrop, on the people who inhabit it, and on the emotional complexities and human interrelationships of individuals in their environment, opening up a discussion regarding the mythical Brasilia, the utopian city born from a dream.

Since then, Brasilia has been the most significant subject in Nicolas Behr’s poetic work, contrasting with Diamantino, his hometown, always present in his memory. The daily anguish of an existence that is at times agonizing, with shades of sarcasm and irony, leads us through poetry that traverses the social and political realms of the metaphor that Brasilia still represents today: bureaucracy and lack of communication, alienation and melancholy, marginality and social exclusion, the dystopia between architecture and the individual who inhabits it, between the human being and life molded within the narrow walls of a small apartment in a modern city built to be a dream, the political dealings that flow from ministry to ministry through the esplanade, the violence and chaos hidden behind the white cement walls and wide tree-lined avenues, the life of the poet who strives to save his soul through art—these are lines that intersect time and again in his poetry, like the cross-axis of the grand Brasilia.

Gerson Fogaça’s visual work, on the other hand, begins as a sketch, a travel record revolving around the urban landscape of the city of Goiânia, where he feels like a foreigner from the start, and with each city he visits as a traveler, instinctively searching for the city of his dreams. But gradually, the drawing starts to distort into fragments, textures, and distinctly expressionistic nuances, and the artist, consciously or unconsciously, captures a way of painting his emotions within that landscape: once again, the anguish of the modern individual who inhabits a big city, with existential contradictions between the need to conform as a social being conditioned by the environment and their own individual spirituality.

While his artistic expression matured early into this critical discourse with a social emphasis on themes such as urban violence, traffic, pollution, and overpopulation in cities, the chaos and dehumanization of individuals within the fabric of contemporary metropolises, in recent times his work has been more directly influenced by the events experienced by Brazilian society in recent years. His most recent work has started to focus directly on the political, social, and racial issues that the country is facing today. In June 2019, one of his pieces, depicting erotic themes and social criticism, provoked censorship and the cancellation of the exhibition “La sangre en la alguidá: una mirada al realismo sucio latinoamericano” (Blood in the Alguidá: A Look at Dirty Latin American Realism), alongside Cuban writer and artist Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, which was supposed to be inaugurated at the Museum of the Post Office in Brasilia.

Fortunately, the exhibition opened to the public a few days later at the National Museum of the Republic, but this disagreement with the ideas of the Federal Government marked the beginning of a more questioning stance by the artist, regarding public policies, institutional practices, and, in general, the course of political power that was becoming closer to the atmosphere of fascist repression experienced during the military dictatorship in Brazil. As a result, in addition to the period of social isolation and uncertainty experienced during the pandemic, his painting became more symbolic and aggressive, with large areas of color and harsh brushstrokes, where blacks, reds, and whites occasionally reveal a bestiary of monsters and demons that seem to hover over the entire space, reminiscent of “La Anunciación,” the black angel by Cuban artist Antonia Eiriz from 1964, which became a harbinger and metaphor of a contradictory and passionate era, with extreme expectations between love and hope, violence and hatred. One work stands out from the title, “Galdino,” a tribute to the indigenous leader Pataxó who was murdered in Brasília by white men twenty-five years ago, a crime that remained largely unpunished.

Recently, on January 1, 2023, Lula Da Silva ascended the ramp to the plateau of the Planalto Presidential Palace for his third term as the elected president of Brazil. In a symbolic act, a group of eight people represented the diversity and inclusion of the Brazilian people as they placed the sash on him: a black woman who collects recyclable materials, a black child, an influencer with physical disabilities, a metallurgical worker, an internationally recognized indigenous leader, a female cook, an artisan, and a young teacher. Lula promises to rebuild Brazil for everyone. Brasília is a hotbed of hopes during those days, but also of contradictions that explode in the streets with a violent energy that invades squares, buildings, and monuments, threatening to ravage the city… Brasília survives. It is still too early to know where Lula’s symbolic gesture will lead: whether Brasília, the dreamed city born from the symbol of the cross, the promised city, the crucified city, the city that reinvented Brazil, will continue to reinvent it.

Eventually, Gerson Fogaça will return to his home studio in Britania, facing Lake dos Tigres, and Nicolas Behr will wander among the flowers of the Pao Brasil nursery, another dream that has lasted for over three decades and is a small piece of his homeland realized in Brasília. But they will always exorcise their demons on canvases and in poetry, those demons that the city hides. From above, the first cross formed by two paths of red earth, once belonging to Goiás and marking the border for the construction of the heroic national project that was Brasília, is no longer distinguishable, nor is the rough wooden cross under which Juscelino Kubitschek delivered the founding speech of the city. But the memory and the longing for the dreamed city, in a dreamed country, in a dreamed world, remain. And the yellow ipê trees will always remain, lost in the infinity of the landscape of Brasília, Braxília, and the Cerrado as a whole.

Dayalís González Perdomo, 

Hialeah Gardens, May 21, 2023.