The idea of moving the federal capital of Brazil inland from the Atlantic coast was proposed several times from the colonial era onwards and envisaged in successive Brazilian constitutions from 1891. However, it was President Juscelino Kubistchek who would carry it out during his term of office from 1956 to 1961. His government implemented the '50 years of progress in 5 years of government' slogan through an aggressive industrialisation policy for the country, at a time when large cities such as São Paulo, Salvador de Bahia and Río de Janeiro coexisted alongside huge rural areas and the world’s largest jungle. Brasilia was founded with the aim of eliminating social differences through Lucio Costa’s urban design and Oscar Neimeyer’s iconic architecture, and with the intention of populating the uninhabited area inland. The buildings have since become an example of modern architecture that has endured, though Costa’s urban planning has been widely criticised for creating a city tailored to and structured around the exclusive use of cars. The colossal project to construct the new city was completed in 41 months, between 23 October 1956 and 21 April 1960, when it was inaugurated as the capital.

Lucio Costa designed Brasilia as a cross; a long central part was occupied by the capital’s institutions and houses were built perpendicular to it, grouped into the so-called superquadras, blocks consisting of eleven six-storey buildings making up one neighbourhood to the north of the central part and another to the south. Despite Costa’s endeavours, the layout of the city looks more like an aeroplane or even a butterfly, as Costa used to claim, facing south-east. Leopoldo Plentz’s photographs are classic portrayals of some of the buildings, most of which are in the “fuselage” and “cabin” of that aeroplane according to the map of the original city. Four of these five photos show the National Library, the National Congress of Brazil, the Planalto Palace and, in the same shot, the National Museum and the cathedral. The fifth photo is of a typical Super Quadra Sul. In any event, human presence in these photographs is merely symbolic, indicating the scale of the buildings in relation to the size of people.

The Brasília series was commissioned by Porto Alegre City Council’s Department of Film, Video and Photography in 2007. For six days and five nights, Plentz drove around Brasilia to retrieve the blueprint of the Federal District, the essence of Costa and Niemeyer’s urban planning, and to showcase it nearly fifty years after the city was built. The pristine black and white of the photos manage to erase the memory of the nearly three thousand workers who died during the building of the city. Two candangos (the nickname given to the building workers) died when they were buried under the structure of Brasilia University, where the Dois Candangos auditorium now stands in memory of them. The profiled, sharp shots of an apparently uninhabited city seem to also include the coldness of its design, planning and implementation. The photographic distance imposed by Plentz is not only temporal, but also formal; and by imposing it he recovers the common feeling of observing a huge lifeless model, like a body stripped of organs.

Álvaro de los Ángeles