A capital rises from the ground

Brasília

Abstract

“Une capitale sort de terre” is one of the two articles about Brasília that the historian Françoise Choay wrote after her visit to Brazil in 1959, when she was invited to participate in the Extraordinary International Congress of Art Critics, conceived by Mario Pedrosa. The text was published a few days after her return to France in the weekly France Observateur, founded by former French resistance fighters in 1950, originally L'Observateur politique, économique et littéraire. Most of the themes addressed in this report would reappear in the article published in the monthly art magazine L'oeil the following month, “Une capitale préfabriquée.” The latter was published in Brazil on two occasions: in the Tribuna da Imprensa in 1960, with a translation by Hildebrando Giudice, and in the anthology on Brasília organized by Alberto Xavier and Julio Katinsky, published in 2012, with a translation by Dorothée de Bruchard. In “Une capitale sort de terre,” the difference in tone compared to the other is noticeable. The genre of writing is journalistic reporting and not critical review, but Choay skillfully articulates the account of her experiences in the city with the theoretical issues that she develops better in other pubblications.