“The Nude Man’s City”: Flávio de Carvalho’s Anthropophagic Architecture as Cultural Criticism

Panu Minkkinen

doi:10.1515/pol-2021-2008

Article

“The Nude Man’s City”: Flávio de Carvalho’s Anthropophagic Architecture as Cultural Criticism

Panu Minkkinen

Published/Copyright: July 9, 2021

Published by

Become an author with De Gruyter Brill

Author Information Explore this Subject

From the journal Pólemos Volume 15 Issue 1

Abstract

Cannibalism is one of the most recognisable taboos of the West and a benchmark with which a supposedly civilised world has traditionally sought to differentiate itself from the radically “other” of the hinterlands. As such, cannibalism has made its way both into the vocabulary of the West’s pseudo-ethnographic self-reflection (e.g. Freud) and the imaginary of its literary culture (e.g. Grimm). A less-well-known strain in this narrative uses cannibalism as a critical postcolonial metaphor. In 1928, the Brazilian poet and agitator Oswald de Andrade published a short text entitled “Anthropophagic Manifesto.” The aim of the manifesto was to distance an emerging Brazilian modernism from the European ideals that the São Paulo bourgeoisie uncritically embraced, and to synthesise more avant-garde ideas with aspects from the cultures of the indigenous Amazonian peoples into a truly national cultural movement. This essay draws on various aspects of the anthropophagic movement and seeks to understand, whether (and how) it influenced Brazilian urban planning and architecture, and especially if it is detectable in the ways in which architects Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer designed and executed the legal and political institutions in Brasília, the country’s iconic federal capital. The ana-lysis, however, identifies a colonialist inclination in Costa and Niemeyer’s ideological debt to Le Corbusier. Instead, the radical potential of anthropophagic architecture is developed with reference to the less-known São Paulo architect and polymath Flávio de Carvalho whose aesthetic politics provide parallels with contemporary radical politics, as well. The essay suggests that such a notion of politics would be akin to a radical anti-instrumentalism that I have elsewhere, following Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot, called a “politics of the impossible.”

Keywords: anthropophagy; architecture; Brazil; constituted power; modernism; space

Corresponding author: Panu Minkkinen, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland, E-mail: panu.minkkinen@helsinki.fi

Thanks to participants at the ASLCH 2020 conference at Quinnipiac Law School for comments on an earlier version. I would also like to thank Roberta de Moura Botelho and Aníbal Fabiano Alves Rocha de Carvalho at CEDAE/UNICAMP, as well as Julieta Sobral at Estudio Malabares, for their invaluable support during the pandemic when archival work suddenly became physically impossible.

Published Online: 2021-07-09

Published in Print: 2021-04-27

You are currently not able to access this content.

Articles in the same Issue

https://doi.org/10.1515/pol-2021-2008

Keywords for this article

anthropophagy; architecture; Brazil; constituted power; modernism; space