In 1930, Brazil’s Antropofagia avant-garde group sent the architect Flávio de Carvalho as its representative to the IV Pan-American Congress of Architecture, which took place that year in Rio de Janeiro.01 De Carvalho (1899-1973), who had returned to Brazil in 1923 after having studied engineering and painting in Durham and Newcastle-upon-Tyne, delivered a lecture to the Congress introducing a master plan for a new city to be built in the tropics. His proposal, ‘A cidade do homem nu’ (‘The City of the Naked Man’), imagined a metropolis for the man of the future, which he saw as a man without god, without property and without marriage. A ‘naked mankind’ that had stripped itself from its cultural constructs – or in de Carvalho’s words, from ‘scholastic taboos’ – would be ‘free for reasoning and thinking’, and could begin a painstaking process of wonderment, change and becoming in this new city. 2 In his proposal, de Carvalho also urged the architects participating in the Congress to understand the anthropophagic nature of their subcontinent on which the city would be built: ‘the City of the Naked Man seeks the resurrection of the primitive, free from Western taboos […] the savage with all of its desires, all of its curiosity intact and not repressed […] as it was by colonial conquest. In search for a Naked civilisation!’ 3
Footnotes
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The term ‘antropofagia’ was used by the Brazilian artist and poet Oswaldo de Andrade (1890—1954),for his ‘Manifesto Antropófago’ from 1928. The term, synonymous with cannibalism, was used byAndrade to mean cultural appropriation, a kind of ‘cultural cannibalism’. The Antropofagia avant-garde movement represented the attitude of a group of modern painters, sculptors and writers based in São Paulo who self-consciously mixed and layered references, origins and genealogies within a territory and a population that shared a mixture of indigenous, African and European lineage. ‘Tupi or not Tupi’,the third line of the manifesto, announces this type of unfixed cultural identity: phonetically, the sentence refers to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but the Tupi were the main indigenous population of Brazil.
