Devour to repair?: A Yanomami intervention in the modernist architecture of the National Congress of Brasilia

Abstract

On the night of December twenty-first, two thousand and twenty, graphics of the Yanomami cosmology were projected on the facades of the National Congress of Brasilia, designed by Oscar Niemeyer, in order to demand the expulsion of illegal gold miners from their Indigenous Lands and to denounce the contamination of soils, rivers and forest degradation of their territories. This projection of the Amerindian animation, entitled Xapiri pë në mari [The breath of the xapiri], with phrases by Davi Kopenawa and illustrations by the artist Joseca Yanomami, besides being a political act of great importance, opens other questions in the field of architecture and urbanism. Faced with the modern project imposed on the territory in the 1950s with the construction of Brasilia, the Yanomami intervention questions and challenges the supremacy of a national urban-territorial project, invoking other epistemologies and worldviews. This reflection explains how this architectural gesture critically devours the institutional building, in the anthropophagic sense, by dressing a symbol of the modern spatial canon with an Amerindian skin. The architectural anthropophagic proposal opens up project perspectives and suggests a dialogue to design together multiple possible urbanities, pointing to other relationships and futures between the Forest and the City.