Arriving in Brasilia can be an overwhelming experience. Apart from the Oscar
Niemeyer pieces that structure the city like the halls of a vast museum, it feels like
everything is designed to prevent you from getting your bearings: the abstract
address system, the same layout used at each and every roundabout, the identical
blocks that are identically confusing. Coming here makes you realise how culturally
specific getting to know a city actually is; wandering through the streets, stumbling
across little squares or back alleys, seeing a park open out in front of you – all of
these things are only possible in a city that has developed as organically as how you
then explore it. In Brasilia, you can never forget that everything has been planned,
the only way to discover it is to make your own plan for doing so.
It was thus all the more surprising to find out that Brasilia was actually built on a
dream, or rather that a dream was used to justify its construction in the first place. In
the late 19th Century, nearly 80 years before constructions began, a Italian priest
called John Bosco had a dream, just one of the many prophetic dreams this later
saint came to be known for. The dream was little more than a series of vague images,
a description of a location on the plains between a isolated mountain range and virgin
forest where the soil held incomparable riches – precious metals, petroleum deposits,
huge quantities of coal. Despite the lack of any specific details, this dream was later
subjected to enough interpretation over the decades to form one of the justifications
for building Brasilia. We found out about this dream after we’d been in Brasilia for a
while and were gradually visiting the various places people had recommended we
see, which included the Santuário Dom Bosco, a church dedicated to Bosco right in
the middle of the city, and the Parque Ecológico Dom Bosco, a lakeside park with a
white obelisk that also commemorates the role of the saint in the creation of the city.
It felt strange to think that this hyper-planned city had theoretically taken its
inspiration from something as intangible as a dream, although as we thought about it
more, we realised how much that actually made sense. Dreams are perfectly elastic
things, you can bend them in whatever direction you like and they won’t break, which
is probably why those behind Brasilia drew on Bosco’s dream in the first place. In a
place without history, what better justification is there than the blessing of a saint,
even if a certain degree of stretching is required to achieve it? Finding this out only
added to our fascination about the city: after already having felt the plan in everything
we saw in Brasilia, somehow we couldn’t now separate anything from the dream.
With this in mind, we shot in various locations across the city, all of which connected
to either the dream, the plan, or both. And in these places, it was impossible not to
relate the things we happened to capture there to everything that went into the
creation of this city. A man waving flags, a chain of ants carrying yellow petals, a map
of Brazil marked out on the asphalt: innocent gestures suddenly rendered meaningful
by our new perspective on them.
The actual reason we’d come to Brasilia was to carry out research on another city
that had both appeared and disappeared while Brasilia itself was being built. This city
was called Vila Amauri and was built by the workers constructing Brasilia as a place
to house themselves and their families. Unlike its more loftily conceived counterpart,
this city sprang up unannounced, the workers using any leftover materials from the
main construction site they could find. Over the course of a single year, houses
popped up and streets emerged, a huge expanse of wood, plasterboard and bitumen
of which only one photograph still exists, its organic disorder almost seeming like a
challenge to the perfectly ordered city materializing behind it. It was a challenge
doomed to fail, as, after just a year, the nearby dam was completed and the Paranoá
River started to rise, submerging this improvised city under a lake had been planned
all along to make sure that the new capital would not lack for water. Even Bosco’s
dream mentioned the beginnings of a lake.
Another photograph was taken at the same spot just one year later, where no trace
of Vila Amauri can be seen, just a group of models on a boat, the lake and newly
inaugurated city beyond. By now, all the people that had lived there previously had
been given land to build on outside of Brasilia, founding new settlements such as
Sobradinho, Nucleo Bandeirante and Ceilandia around the new capital that came to
be known as satellite cities. It was as if all the planning that went into Brasilia should
not be tarnished by disorder, as if disorder and its agents were only fit for the bottom
of a lake or places far enough away to not disturb all the pre-planned symmetry.
After having filmed so many places that seemed to unwillingly encapsulate the order
on which Brasilia is built, we felt it necessary to counter them with something that
embodied disorder, to balance out all the perfect grooming with some carefree
disorganisation. When plans are often all-encompassing, there’s something
comforting in the idea that they’ll always be something left behind which the planners
never planned for. The underwater footage of the remains of Vila Amauri and the
photos of that strange period between the plan and its execution bear testament to
the fact that even if such surplus is kept out of sight, you can’t ever say it wasn’t there.