Brasília fantasma: a taba contemporânea e a refavela - nebulosas intelectuais entre Brasil e Nigéria a partir de Lucio Costa (1963-1977)

Abstract

At the crossing point between Brazil and Nigeria, we will try to present the construc- tion of Brasilia and its phantasmatic images based on two unrealized projects by Lucio Costa - namely the unrealized exhibition "L'art au Brésil: la taba contemporaine de Brasilia" for the Petit Palais in Paris in 1963 and the unrealized urban planning propo- sal for the new capital of Nigeria, Abuja, in 1976. We will try to create a nebula (Pereira, 2022) of relationships between discourses, actors and institutions situated in time, in a kind of wandering and deviant prosopography. To this end, we will bring these two unfinished projects together with two other projects that were not conceived by Lucio Costa, but which were carried out in synchronous efforts with those of the Brazilian architect-urbanist: the "Imagem Africana" exhibition held in Brazil in 1963 and the FESTAC Town urban project by Doxiadis Associates inaugurated in Lagos, Nigeria, in 1977 for the II World Festival of Black and African Arts and Culture. We have chosen to present these projects from the perspective of non-architects: Lagos-based Brazilian Romana da Conceição and musician Gilberto Gil. Therefore, in the transit between the two countries, the professional and intellectual paths of architects and urban planners are traversed by dictators, filmmakers, chancellors, intellectuals, anthropologists, artists, musicians, journalists, theatres, diplomats, yalorixás and obás. At the cross- roads between progress and catastrophe, had Nigeria dreamed of a racial democracy, just like Brazil, through the construction of new capitals and urban transformations in modernizing uprisings? Have these dreams collapsed? Which futures were inter- rupted and remain as traces? How can we glimpse their glimpses or the appearance of their phantoms?In Brasília Fantasma we set out to map how racial democracy became a political operator for architecture and urbanism in transatlantic transit and how the colonial project of racist segregation and exclusion of certain bodies, contradictorily, persevered in a dissimulated way within the developmentalist and nationalist expe- riences of these two nations, however emancipatory they aimed to be. We also want to reclaim, in the sense of Isabelle Stengers (2012), the insurgent and counter-colonial experiences that survive and persevere in times and spaces despite all the violence imposed, and also to reconstitute other possible histories (Hartman, 2022) from the transatlantic diasporic experiences (Gilroy, 2002) of re-encounters between the fami- liar and the strange in their subjective dimension of urban affections between Brazil and Nigeria. In this way, we are be ing on an off-centered and polyphonic narrative that emphasizes the accumulation, complexity and ambivalence of intersecting times and spaces.