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| Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre in a meeting with Brazilian President Juscelino Kubitschek. Brasilia, Brazil, 1960. Photo: Agência Nacional / Arquivo Nacional. |
Two of the first foreigners to ever land in Brasília were Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, by the end of the 1960s, not long after the inauguration of Brazil's new capital.
de Beauvoir found Brasília to be an artificial city in the middle of a desert. She wrote about the futuristic city: "I'm leaving Brasília with the greatest pleasure... this city will never have a soul, heart, flesh or blood".
I can't say that I'm surprised by such statement. I'm disappointed, though. Brasília could be reached only by airplane or horseback. There were no inhabitants and no roads. What did de Beauvoir expect from an artificial city that has just been created?
What strikes me is that as an existentialist, de Beauvoir believed that existence precedes essence; hence, she asserted, one is not born a woman, but becomes one. Well, the same is true of a planned city like Brasília. It was not to grow organically but to be born, as Costa said, “as if she had been fully grown”.
Indeed, time proved de Beauvoir wrong - at least in this point.
Generally for existentialists, one is not born anything: everything we are is the result of our choices, as we build ourselves out of our own resources and those which society gives us. We don ’t only create our own values, we create ourselves. Source.
Brasília is nowadays home for many Brazilians and foreigners, hosts a number of cultural events, art interventions, and local movements for occupying spaces forgotten or neglected by the government as a way of reclaiming the city to the population.
However, I'll agree that de Beauvoir and Sartre were right to state that the city seemed already grossly unfair and exclusionary regarding the exclusive organization of its urban space - Brasilia was primarily conceived to be residence of politicians, authorities, civil servants and respective families. In other words, no room was planned for low-income populations who came from other Brazilian states to help build the new capital. Most of them came from poor cities, and they couldn't afford a place in the select Pilot Plan - nor to go back to their hometowns.
In fact, over the years, this discriminatory conception led those people to be pulled to the surroundings of Brasília, which then became the so-called 'satellite towns'. Or should we call rather call them boroughs of the metropolis – that is what they actually are, as is has been recently suggested?
Anyways, let's leave this topic for another discussion.
I only wished that that de Beauvoir and Sartre could visit Brasília once again. Despite reasserting the wrong turn in Brasília's urban planning, they might find a vivid, pulsating, unquiet city reborn from the ashes - or better, the sands of this endless savanna.
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| Simone de Beauvoir, Oscar Niemeyer, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jorge Amado and his brother James. Brasilia, Brazil, 1960. Photographer unknown. |
To see more pictures of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre in Brazil, please visit http://www.flickriver.com/photos/casadejorgeamado/popular-interesting/.
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