Project Title

Beyond Concrete: From Modernist Meta-Racial Monuments to Afro-Brazilian History in the Post-Abolition Era (Brasília, Brazil)

Project Description

"Beyond Concrete" investigates the possibilities of reconstructing the memory of modernist monuments in the city of Brasília (1960). The Brazilian new capital embodies a national project of obliteration through modernist architecture and public policies of urban modernity, which become more perceptible when viewed through a transnational lens that illuminates events in South Africa during the 1950s. Beyond these urban structures of anti-Blackness, this work examines the alternatives proposed by Black associations and activists as they engage with and contest these monuments, offering an alternative narrative about race in Brazil.