GLOBAL BODY

“This century we’ve already trainspotted novel strains of African swine fever, Campylobacter, Cryptosporidium, Cyclospora, Ebola, E. coli O157:H7, foot-and-mouth disease, hepatitis E, Listeria, Nipah virus, Q fever, Salmonella, Vibrio, Yersinia, Zika, and a variety of novel influenza A variants, including H1N1 (2009), H1N2v, H3N2v, H5N1, H5N2, H5Nx, H6N1, H7N1, H7N3, H7N7, H7N9, and H9N2.

And near-nothing real was done about any of them. Authorities spent a sigh of relief upon each’s reversal and immediately took the next roll of the epidemiological dice, risking snake eyes of maximum virulence and transmissibility.

That approach suffers more than a failure of foresight or nerve. However necessary, emergency interventions cleaning up each of these messes can make matters worse.

You see, sources of intervention compete. And, as my colleagues and I argue, emergency criteria are deployed as impositions in Gramscian hegemony to keep us from talking about structural interventions around power and production. Because, don’t you know, we’re warned, IT’S AN EMERGENCY RIGHT NOW!

Atop this game of keep away, the failure to address structural problems can render these very emergency interventions ineffectual. The Allee threshold that prophylaxes and quarantine aim to push pathogen populations below—so that infections may burn out on their own unable to find new susceptibles—is set by structural causes.

As our team wrote about the Ebola outbreak in West Africa:

“Commoditizing the forest may have lowered the region’s ecosystemic threshold to such a point that no emergency intervention can drive the Ebola outbreak low enough to burn out. Novel spillovers suddenly express larger forces of infection. On the other end of the epicurve, a mature outbreak continues to circulate, with the potential to intermittently rebound.

“In short, neoliberalism’s structural shifts are no mere background on which the emergency of Ebola takes place. The shifts are the emergency as much as the virus itself… Deforestation and intensive agriculture may strip out traditional agroforestry’s stochastic friction, which typically keeps the virus from lining up enough transmission.”

Despite now both an effective vaccine and antivirals, Ebola is presently undergoing its longest recorded outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo. What got lost along the way? Where is our biomedical God now? Blaming the Congolese to cover up this failure is an exercise in colonial displacement, washing imperialism’s hands of decades of structural adjustment and regime change in the global North’s favor.”

– Rob Wallace, Coronavirus: Agribusiness Breeds Another Deadly Epidemic, posted January 29 2020

Coronavirus: Agribusiness breeds another deadly epidemic

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(of course one certainly can and should blame the Congolese state *along with* the rest of the various states, non-state bodies and capitals involved, rather than defaulting to the left’s usual incomplete understanding of imperialism.)

“The [Chinese] national state machinery really started to roll on January 22nd, when authorities upgraded the emergency response measures in all of Hubei province, and told the publicthey had the legal authority to set up quarantine facilities, as well as to “collect” any personnel, vehicles, and facilities necessary to the containment of the disease, or to set up blockades and control traffic (thereby rubberstamping a phenomenon it knew would occur regardless). In other words, the full deployment of state resources actually began with a call for volunteer efforts on behalf of locals. On the one hand, such a massive disaster will strain any state’s capacity (see, for instance, hurricane response in the US). But, on the other, this repeats a common pattern in Chinese statecraft whereby the central state, lacking efficient formal and enforceable command structures that extend all the way down to the local level, must instead rely on a combination of widely-publicized calls for local officials and local citizens to mobilize and a series of after-the-fact punishments meted out to the worst responders (framed as crackdowns on corruption). The only truly efficient response is to be found in specific areas where the central state focuses the bulk of its power and attention—in this case, Hubei generally and Wuhan specifically. By the morning of January 24th, the city was already in an effective full lock down, with no trains in or out nearly one month after the new strain of the coronavirus was first detected. National health officials have declared that health authorities have the ability to examine and quarantine anyone at their discretion. Beyond the major cities of Hubei, dozens of other cities across China, including Beijing, Guangzhou, Nanjing and Shanghai, have launched lockdowns of varying severity on flows of people and goods in and out of their borders.

In response to the central state’s call to mobilize, some localities have taken their own strange and severe initiatives. The most frightening of these are to be found in four cities in Zhejiang province, where thirty million people have been issued local passports, allowing only one person per household to leave home once every two days. Cities like Shenzhen and Chengdu have ordered that each neighborhood be locked down, and allowed entire apartment buildings to be quarantined for 14 days if a single confirmed case of the virus is found within. Meanwhile, hundreds have been detained or fined for “spreading rumors” about the disease, and some who have fled quarantine have been arrested and sentenced to lengthy jail time—and the jails themselves are now experiencing a severe outbreak, due to officials’ incapacity to isolate sick individuals even in an environment literally designed for easy isolation. These sorts of desperate, aggressive measures mirror those of extreme cases of counterinsurgency, most clearly recalling the actions of military-colonial occupation in places like Algeria, or, more recently, Palestine. Never before have they been conducted at this scale, nor in megacities of this kind that house much of the world’s population. The conduct of the clampdown then offers a strange sort of lesson for those with a mind for global revolution, since it is, essentially, a dry run of state-led reaction.

[…]

This particular clampdown benefits from its seemingly humanitarian character, with the Chinese state able to mobilize greater numbers of locals to help in what is, essentially, the noble cause of strangling the spread of the virus. But, as is to be expected, such clampdowns always also backfire. Counterinsurgency is, after all, a desperate sort of war conducted only when more robust forms of conquest, appeasement and economic incorporation have become impossible. It is an expensive, inefficient and rearguard action, betraying the deeper incapacity of whatever power is tasked with deploying it—be they French colonial interests, the waning American imperium, or others. The result of the clampdown is almost always a second insurgency, bloodied by the crushing of the first and made even more desperate. Here, the quarantine will hardly mirror the reality of civil war and counterinsurgency. But even in this case, the clampdown has backfired in its own ways. With so much of the state’s effort focused on control of information and constant propaganda deployed via every possible media apparatus, unrest has expressed itself largely within the same platforms.

The death of Dr. Li Wenliang, an early whistleblower on the dangers of the virus, on February 7th shook citizens cooped up in their homes across the country. Li was one of eight doctors rounded up by police for spreading “false information” in early January, before later contracting the virus himself. His death triggered anger from netizens and a statement of regret from the Wuhan government. People are beginning to see that the state is made up of bumbling officials and bureaucrats who have no idea what to do but still put on a strong face.[xvi] This fact was essentially revealed when the mayor of Wuhan, Zhou Xianwang, was forced to admit on state television that his government had delayed releasing critical information about the virus after an outbreak had occurred. The very tension caused by the outbreak, combined with that induced by the state’s total mobilization, has begun to reveal to the general populace the deep fissures that lie behind the paper-thin portrait that the government paints of itself. In other words, conditions such as these have exposed the fundamental incapacities of the Chinese state to growing numbers of people who previously would have taken the government’s propaganda at face value.”

– Chuang, “Social Contagion: Microbiological Class War in China,” posted February 26, 2020

“The fact is that the “natural” sphere is already subsumed under a fully global capitalist system that has succeeded in changing baseline climatic conditions and devasting so many pre-capitalist[x] ecosystems that the remainder no longer function as they might have in the past. Here lies yet another causative factor, since, according to Wallace, all these processes of ecological devastation reduce “the kind of environmental complexity with which the forest disrupts transmission chains.” The reality, then, is that it’s a misnomer to think of such areas as the natural “periphery” of a capitalist system. Capitalism is already global, and already totalizing. It no longer has an edge or border with some natural, non-capitalist sphere beyond it, and there is therefore no great chain of development in which “backward” countries follow those ahead of them on their way up the value chain, nor any true wilderness capable of being preserved in some sort of pure, untouched condition. Instead, capital merely has a subordinated hinterland, itself fully subsumed within global value chains. The resulting social systems—including everything from supposed “tribalism” to renewals of anti-modern fundamentalist religions—are wholly contemporary products, and are almost always de facto plugged into global markets, often quite directly. The same can be said of the resulting biological-ecological systems, since “wild” areas are actually immanent to this global economy in both the abstract sense of dependence on the climate and related ecosystems and in the direct sense of being plugged into those same global value chains.

This fact produces the conditions necessary for the transformation of “wild” viral strains into global pandemics. But COVID-19 is hardly the worst of these. An ideal illustration of the basic principle—and the global danger—can be found instead in Ebola. The Ebola virus[xi] is a clear case of an existing viral reservoir spilling out into the human population. Current evidence suggests that its origin hosts are several species of bats native to West and Central Africa, which act as carriers but are not themselves affected by the virus. The same is not true for the other wild mammals, such as primates and duikers, which periodically contract the virus and suffer rapid, high-fatality outbreaks. Ebola has a particularly aggressive lifecycle beyond its reservoir species. Through contact with any of these wild hosts, humans can also be infected, with devastating results. Several major epidemics have occurred, and the fatality rate for the majority has been extremely high, almost always greater than 50%. The largest recorded outbreak, which continued sporadically from 2013 to 2016 across several West African countries, saw 11,000 deaths. The fatality rate for patients hospitalized in this outbreak was in the range of 57-59%, and much higher for those with no access to hospitals. In recent years, several vaccines have been developed by private companies, but slow approval mechanisms and stringent intellectual property rights have combined with the widespread lack of a health infrastructure to produce a situation in which vaccines have done little to stop the most recent epidemic, centered in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and now the longest lasting outbreak.

The disease is often presented as if it were something like a natural disaster—at best random, at worst blamed on the “unclean” cultural practices of the forest-dwelling poor. But the timing of these two major outbreaks (2013-2016 in West Africa and 2018-present in the DRC) is not a coincidence. Both have occurred precisely when the expansion of primary industries has been further displacing forest-dwelling peoples and disrupting local ecosystems. In fact, this appears to be true for more than the most recent cases, since, as Wallace explains, “every Ebola outbreak appears connected to capital-driven shifts in land use, including back to the first outbreak in Nzara, Sudan in 1976, where a British-financed factory spun and wove local cotton.” Similarly, the outbreaks in 2013 in Guinea occurred right after a new government had begun to open the country to global markets and sell off large tracts of land to international agribusiness conglomerates. The palm oil industry, notorious for its role in deforestation and ecological destruction worldwide, seems to have been particularly culpable, since its monocultures both devastate the robust ecological redundancies that help to interrupt transmission chains and at the same time literally attract the bat species that serve as a natural reservoir for the virus.[xii]

Meanwhile, the sale of large tracts of land to commercial agroforestry companies entails both the dispossession of forest-dwelling locals and the disruption of their ecosystem-dependent local forms of production and harvest. This often leaves the rural poor with no choice but to push further into the forest at the same time that their traditional relationship with that ecosystem has been disrupted. The result is that survival increasingly depends on the hunting of wild game or harvesting of local flora and timber for sale on global markets. Such populations then become the stand-ins for the ire of global environmentalist organizations, who decry them as “poachers” and “illegal loggers” responsible for the very deforestation and ecological destruction that pushed them to such trades in the first place. Often, the process then takes a much darker turn, as in Guatemala, where anti-communist paramilitaries leftover from the country’s civil war were transformed into “green” security forces, tasked with “protecting” the forest from the illegal logging, hunting and narcotrafficking that were the only trades available to its indigenous residents—who had been pushed to such activities precisely because of the violent repression they had faced from those same paramilitaries during the war.[xiii] The pattern has since been reproduced all over the world, cheered on by social media posts in high income countries celebrating the (often literally caught-on-camera) execution of “poachers” by supposedly “green” security forces.[xiv]”

– Chuang, “Social Contagion: Microbiological Class War in China,” posted February 26, 2020

“Continuities can be found if one proceeds along the thread of this review, from the space of the canvas to the space of the territory, from Tarsila’s oeuvre to the works of Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer. Lúcio and Tarsila share a certain fondness for simplicity, linearity and geometry, for sober and synthetic lines. Both cherish the simple and functional lines of the rural colonial house, the distinct horizontal profile of old Brazilian farmhouses.

Another thread of continuity runs through the wide and sinuous curves of Tarsila’s ‘cannibalistic’ style and Niemeyer’s architecture. In both, the choice of curves stands as an emblem of Brazilian visuality, via the references moving from African culture one moment, to the country’s nature the next. The rounded features of Tarsila’s The Negress (1923), which stand out in the foreground against the structure in horizontal bands in the background, foreshadow the preponderance of curves in her ‘cannibalistic’ painting; Pampulha’s curves in turn, in Niemeyer’s design, synthetically encompass the horizons of Minas Gerais.

Beyond this order of similarities, the modernist platforms of all three coincide. In these platforms, the power to modernise includes a civilising and universalising ambition. Modernisation implies the operation on a board on which one plays alone. In this way, the power of the subject and their thinking become unified on the basis of a rational and civilised project. This project enjoys the prerogative of top-down planning, properly dividing the space of the country, of which the symbolic, plastic or architectural field supposedly presents itself as a double or simile. Thus one can see in all of them an echo of the coloniser’s manorial privilege to legislate unilaterally. The building of the Ministry of Education and Health, commissioned in 1936 by Gustavo Capanema, a minister under Getúlio Vargas’s dictatorship, and the Pampulha ensemble (1941) – in short, the milestones of pre-1945 modern architecture in Brazil were born of the commission of the authorities of the so-called ‘Estado Novo’ (‘New State’).** Despite these authorities’ supposed modern and ‘enlightened’ credentials, they were hardly democratic.

In the cycle of economic and political expansion, which begins in the post-war period in 1945, Brazilian architecture develops too. Innovations emerge in the interface between buildings and their natural environment. The ‘Brazilian genius’ distinguishes itself, as art and architecture critic Mário Pedrosa notes, in the invention of new systems of thermal protection, ventilation, natural light, brise-soleil panels, trusses, cloisters and perforated bricks known as cobogós – into the architecture, these incorporate, with remarkable visual imagination, the graphic arts, another landmark of Brazilian excellence at the time. The integration of garden and residence, turning the external space into an extension of the interior, will become another mark of the inventiveness of this architecture.

Burle Marx, a pioneering and exemplary landscape architect, abandons the classic garden beds and short-grass lawns. His art is also innovative in its use of colours. He avoids chromatic divisionism in favour of large spots of colour. As in Tarsila, a synthesis occur between features of European modern art and primitive or anticlassical elements, elevated to national emblems. A collaborator of Oscar Niemeyer and Lúcio Costa, Burle Marx uses plants from the Amazon rainforest and others, which are found in backyards or at the roadside. Like Tarsila’s colours, these plants constitute elements that are ‘familiar to the ambience of the Brazilian countryside’ and absent from classicising academic art. Architecture and nature combine, each supplementing the other:

‘Burle Marx’s gardens are also a piece of nature, although they still participate in the life of the house and serve as a sort of cadence to its spatial rhythm. Now their function is to expand it, to make it overflow into open spaces.’

The presidential palaces, designed by Niemeyer, also serve to integrate buildings and nature: horizontal constructions, surrounded by large verandas, porches or terraces, according to the architectural tradition of the large plantation owners’ houses. Along these large verandas, the Alvorada and the Planalto palaces also feature a column/sculpture hybrid whose curves not only stylistically update the bulging of Greek columns, but also suggest another national emblem: the full sails of the ‘jangadas’ (‘rafts’). However, in decorating the porches around the palaces, such columns, in addition to the emblematic dimension they have for the external public, play a different role: they frame the ‘Cerrado’ landscape. They function in a similar way to the plantation owners’ houses built at a highest point of the land, proposing the view of the landscape as a patrimonial item. As in Tarsila’s paintings, Niemeyer’s columns, these abstract modern pieces, articulate the abstract operations of modern drawing, with typical Brazilian colours, in this case those of the ‘Cerrado.’ Therefore, while modern, the building presents itself not as an urban element, but as a unit in the landscape, in the manner of the rural colonial house.***

In short, a single kind of relationship binds Brazilian modernist architecture: the integration between architecture and nature, or the rational and evaluative use of nature by the architectural project. However, as Pedrosa notes, this takes place ‘to the possible detriment of a deeper, more articulate spatial logic in the play of volumes and interior spaces.’ 

Therefore, the excellence of this architecture resides in the valorisation of nature rather than in the urban outline, the latter goal being something that would better correspond to the functionalist directrix of modern architectural rationalism. That is to say, the atavistic perspective of Brazilian modern architecture is still that of the civiliser/coloniser, who springs upon the so-called virgin (sic) land to to incorporate it into a so-called civilisation/market. This genetic mark will also be that of the ‘Plano Pilato’ (Pilot Plan) of Brasília. The geometric-modular structure, without an organic or autochthonous background, which populates the plane with communicative and internationalising shapes, in the works of Tarsila, is also that of the logic expressed by the memorial of Lúcio Costa, for the Brasília competition. On page 2 of the original copy of Plano Piloto, the architect-urbanist, in presenting his choice, says frankly, as was his way: ‘It was born of a primary gesture of someone who marks a place or takes possession of it: two axes crossing each other according to a right angle, that is, the very sign of the cross.’

In contrast, there is also the aspect of planning, under which such architecture attempts to distinguish itself from the colonial tradition. Throughout history, the private advance inland has always occurred according to immediate and unilateral interests. That is, since the captaincies, the first form of privatisation in Brazil, to the expeditions of the bandeirantes,^ and later, during the implementation of the agrarian-exporting latifundia of the coffee growers of São Paulo, the march inland from the coastal areas was invariably chaotic and predatory. Modern constructive actions, in turn, have a planned character. And, for Pedrosa, the prime example of planned territorial occupation would be Brasília.

As such, the critic justifies the creation of the new capital city as an example of a new logic, counterposing it precisely to the opening of the coffee farms by the ‘Paulistas’.^^ The devastation caused by the latifundia created a certain kind of city:

‘The land seller quickly has a few streets laid out … and the sale of lots starts right there. The first houses … indicate the future main street, the road itself. There is nothing more practical for the flow of goods … The pioneers are indifferent to the local environment, because they never stop, in their incessant race.’

Brasília, in turn, is ‘an old political idea, ingrained through the generations’, according to Pedrosa. Politics and planning as forms of rationality would thus be counterposed to the chaos of profit.^^^

The fate of Brasília, however, could be (as in fact it was) different from that of the planned and emancipationist utopia, which should amalgamate the projects of the new capital and agrarian reform. In this sense, Pedrosa had already been warning since 1957:

‘It is no accident that there is something contradictory hidden within the extremely modern envelope of its concept … Lúcio Costa’s Brasília is a beautiful utopia, but will it have anything to do with the Brasília that Juscelino Kubistchek wants to build?’

One of the risks particular to Brasília, isolated as it is from other urban areas, would be to become a seedbed for bureaucracy.+ Hence Pedrosa’s praise of Lúcio’s plan, which, unlike the others, ‘brilliantly evaded any type of closed form’, avoiding the vice of ‘bureaucratic centralism … and the administrative omnipotence of one who makes decisions without the resistances of a clear opinion and of nondispersed contrasting forces’.

A second prophetic warning also had a political tone:

‘In spite of his creative imagination … Lúcio Costa tends to yield to anachronisms … Lúcio’s plan envisions the city’s monumental axis above the municipal sector, beyond the ‘automobile parking lots following one beltway and the barracks following the other’ (quoting the architect). (But Pedrosa exclaims:) What barracks are these? According to him, they are really army troop barracks … (And he continues:) First, one asks oneself: Why these barracks within the city? Second, what are the specific functions of these troops when the new capital … is sheltered from sudden enemy landing and can only be reached by air? There is no military justification for detaching land troops … unless these troops were not meant for defense against external enemies, but, at certain moments deemed opportune, for driving their tanks, in the way we know all too well, through the city’s central axis, in order to affect the inhabitants themselves and weigh … upon the deliberations of one or more of the powers of the Republic. But why change, then? Why Brasília? Why dream of utopias?

Hence the subtitle of the text: ‘Brasília or Maracangalha?’ Today we know very well in what respect Pedrosa’s forecasts were right. But returning to the obvious things about Brasília is useful to delimit the historical roots of this pioneering generation of modern architects, as alien to a context of urban reflection. In short, their perspective is just like that of the first modernists, who synthesised modern poetic structures and national elements, previously repressed by academic art. In this symbolic operation, in line with the circumstances and limitations of the historical moment, the national emblems they elaborate suggest an immediate or semi-organic contact with nature.++ That is to say, in this perspective, Brazil is much more myth and nature than city and social formation, brought about by the social division of labour.

In addition to primitive incantations, only the visual languages, generated alongside the social sciences and other forms of knowledge, after the installation of an industrial network in the postwar period, will in fact build other cognitive models on the basis of urban issues and the country seen as a social-historical formation. The problems of Brazilian cities are then posed more clearly for the new architects and artists, in light of democratic demands and mass production. A combination of urban issues, inherent to such patterns, gives rise to new challenges and achievements for architecture: to meet the universalisation of the rights of use of the soil and of the urban environment, to similarly equate the internal/external flows and connections, to propose plural environments, anonymous structures, etc.

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*Maracangalha is an imaginary and parodic city mentioned in a song with the same title (1957) by Dorival Caimmy – one of the most important popular songwriters in Brazil. Contemporary to the construction of Brasília, the song ironically alludes to the myth of Brasília as a very modern city, as the singer affirms he would go to Maracangalha, even alone, without his girlfriend, but certainly not without his straw hat. That was the typical condition of the manual workers who migrated from very poor rural regions, mainly in the Northeast of Brazil, to construct Brasília. They lived in slums (actually in huts made of sacks of cement) around the territory of the capital city and, after the inauguration of Brasília in 1961, they gathered in the so-called satellite towns that actually reproduced their poor peasant background, thus very different from the official city of Brasília, limited to the Plano Piloto, designed by Lucio Costa, where the palaces conceived by Oscar Niemeyer were built.

**That was the self-denomination that the authorities gave to the specific form of dictatorial Brazilian state, from 1937 to 1945. The name was possibly borrowed from Portugal, where Salazar’s dictatorship took that name from 1933 onwards, until the 1974 Revolution.

***The priority given to the conception of the building as an isolated unit in the landscape, intended for contemplation, is also revealed in a recent text buy the architect about the project of the Ibirapuera Park auditorium: ‘Architecture… How good to see on the white sheet of paper a palace, a cathedral, a new form emerge, anything that creates the astonishment allowed by reinforced concrete!’

^Colonial pioneers and slave hunters.

^^Paulistas were the landowners from the state of São Paulo. Pedrosa relies on the thesis of the French geographer Pierre Mombeig, Pionniers et planteurs de São Paulo (1952), who links the expansion of the Paulistas inland to Portuguese colonisation, both conjugating ‘continuous displacement’ and a ‘tenacious desire for profit’. Hence the instability of the population, ‘an uninterrupted race’, ‘the destruction of the land’ … ‘the grass barely grows again in the places where planters settle’.

^^^’The spirit that breathes over Brasília … is the spirit of utopia, the spirit of the plan … Brasília is a gesture … of a deep national need: defence of the land, under a continuous and terrible process of destruction … Brasília could hasten the time of liberation from the excessively immediate submission to the prices of the international market. Brasília only could force the pioneering front to settle … The national market’s pace of expansion will be intensified by the creation of true and new regions, in the centre of the country, around the new capital. Besides, it will not be possible to reequip or better equip these lands without the agrarian reform that is more and more talked about in Brazil. In short, Brasília supposes a geographic, social and cultural remodeling of the entire country … The time for the economic renaissance will be the time for planning. The time for planning is the end of the advance of pioneering speculation’.

+In an ‘isolated, artificial climate, moral irresponsibility will flourish luxuriantly as the centralism of a new technocratic bureaucracy – all-powerful as a result of its remoteness from national life proper, along with the tremendous availability of resources.’ 

++For the sake of nuance and precision, it is worth noting the observations of Sérgio Buarque de Holanda that the Portuguese colonial city, unlike those of Hispanic America, does not reflect ‘abstract reason’, since it ‘does not contradict nature’s framework, and its silhouette is linked to the line of the landscape’.”

– Luiz Renato Martins, The Long Roots of Formalism in Brazil, entire section Brasília or Maracangalha, pgs. 17-23

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Image: Lúcio Costa’s original plan of Brasília

“In Tarsila [do Amaral]’s ‘Cannibalistic’ (‘Antropófago’) style, the same basic components remain in place: the alliance between the nationalist program and the analytic content of the poetics, marked by the modernising and internationalising power of formalisation, instituted through lines that legislate hegemonically over the plastic field. The composition remains linear and modular. It brings together elements from previous works and internal series, in which the shapes, while varying in size and combinations, affirm themselves like derivations of a module. This rational poetics does not fear repetition.

Colour, in turn, in this ‘linear-cannibalistic’ order, accounts for the volumetry. It therefore continues to function as the element that maintains the memory of the gaze and of the tactile experience of childhood, the feeling of the agrarian and pre-industrial world. In fact, in Tarsila’s painting of the period, the chromatic fields are widened, along with imagery prospection. However, despite gaining in intensity and eloquence, the colours remain subjected to a simple and economic project whose aim is to be universalist, cosmopolitan and rational. 

Certainly, such a poetic programme has two goals: to catch up with international modern art, and to broaden the social base of national culture. However, by reiterating childhood sensations in adulthood, this desire to modernise reveals a private angle amid the universalist impulse: a socially protected life, which preserves the continuity between childhood and adult life; a passage destroyed for most without them having any say in the matter, reduced to the mere condition of being part of the workforce. Thus, the modernising impetus stems from someone educated to command and signals, like the rest of Modernism, ‘the (populist) attempt of a cultural elite to eliminate class differences and to create an art that would be the expression of nationality as a whole.’”

– Luiz Renato Martins, The Long Roots of Formalism in Brazil, pgs. 16-17

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Image: Tarsila do Amaral, Antropofagia (Anthropophagy), 1929, oil on canvas, 126 x 142 cm, Fundação José and Paulina Nemirovsky Collection, São Paulo