Brasilia

 

Text: Avram Goldmann

Photos: Mira Zdjelar

 

The future is what will be, but it's also what will have been, or what could have been. It's in the past, and in the present, among us, often invisible, always just beyond reach. A possible future seen in the present is more than a dream; it's a revelation.

 

 

The speedy escalator of a sparsely populated public space, a silhouette, perhaps a silhouette of the one projecting the mind forward to try to grasp the direction of human development, to visit places a person can never visit, marvelling at the red dome, the glitzy colours of things to come. The future is a giant shadow, a cloud whose shape one can never see, but whose contour challenges and invites the observer. The journey into the future starts in imagination.

 

 

It's never a linear journey. As the present penetrates the impenetrable layers of time it becomes a multidimensional thing, a form wanting to be the point of convergence. However, convergence isn't about points, it's not a simple arrow that can go through walls. By touching time all we feel is more of its complexity, the complexity that haunts our existence.

 

 

There's something fundamentally disturbing about a place that serves as a museum of the future. The visitor, an avid museum-goer who knows that museums are of the past and about the past, is disoriented, caught in the whirlwind of associations, caught in the whirlwind of time.

 

 

As the marble floor clinks, it captures the visitor in a no-place space, in a city escaping from the present, not in both, but in all directions.

 

 

And it was a dream! Steal the land from itself, transform it into a symbolic, yet liveable, space where high-rises designed to be of the next century will watch over buildings inspired by those built a long time ago by the conquered, the vanished, as an homage to those for whom time may have been a more natural, less oppressive, less urgent phenomenon. In this interplay of styles the last rays of the sinking sun fall on a building obviously inspired by architecture of peoples of the Sun.

 

Nowhere on this planet have I had such a strong feeling of being displaced but, oddly enough, not necessarily misplaced, or no more than any other human, lost in the netherworld between awe and the profound feeling of being trapped on this journey toward a future that has never quite materialized. There is hardly a place on Earth that feels so alienating while being entirely human-made.

 

What's the mental projection of a physical landscape that has deliberately limited itself to blocks of concrete against the sky? Brasilia is the physical equivalent of 50s and 60s science fiction, a futuristic yet dated exhibit from a time when people were thinking about space ships more than about computers, a time that preceded the millennial fears that have forced us to become an inward-looking civilization again.

 

Construed to lead a nation into the future, it's a strange combination of a fascinating urban dream and a potential set for an early Star Trek episode never shot. Almost half a century later, the endeavour has arguably become a magnificent failure, but the futuristic low-tech feel of Brasilia has perhaps more oddball charm than ever. Turned into a huge museum of high modernist urban planning, it's lost some of its pompousness, and, in spite of looking dehumanizing, it harbours a deeply humanistic drive of those who built it.

 

Monumental and decaying, rather than offering shapes of things to come, it offers shapes of things that might have come. In some ways, it's indicative of Brazil and South America as a whole – a promise that has collapsed under its own weight, an opportunity missed multiple times during the repetitive course of ruthless history.

 

 

Its ministries of rotting steel and broken glass look somehow less menacing, less intimidating in their present sad shape. Brasilia is reminiscent of projections of the post-atomic future, except the nuclear war that has turned it into what it is today occurred inside the human mind. In many ways, it's paradigmatically Brazilian, a project of a culture that's a culture of creation, not a culture of maintenance.  

 

 

And, against all odds, the creation lives on, in all its magnificent shabbiness, in all its shabby magnificence.