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.
| ISBN: | 9783030371395 |
| Publication date: | 30th January 2021 |
| Author: | Sophia Beal |
| Publisher: | Springer Nature Switzerland AG |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Pagination: | 252 pages |
| Series: | New Directions in Latino American Cultures |
| Genres: |
Cultural studies The arts: general topics |