Popular Refractions: Lina Bo Bardi and Marilena Chaui at the Crisis of the National-Popular in the redemocratization of Brazil. (original) (raw)

The paths of the Italian-born Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi (1914-1992) and the Brazilian philosopher Marilena Chaui (1941 - ) crossed in the Workers' Party (PT) first government in São Paulo between 1988 and 1992, during the government of the Mayor Luiza Erundina (1934 - ). It was the first time that the new party, created in 1980 at the end of a dictatorship (1964-1981), ruled in the largest city in the country. Lina Bo Bardi was commissioned to design São Paulo’s new City Hall while the philosopher headed the Secretary of Culture. This act would move the City Hall back to the historic center after being located for many years in the wealthy neighborhood of Ibirapuera Park, in a pavilion designed by Oscar Niemeyer. The new City Hall would occupy a historic building called Palácio das Indústrias and sought to symbolically bring the public power closer to the people, based on a common conciliatory memory related to work and industry. The antecedents of this episode reveal a common interest and disagreements of these women about politics, culture, and their relationship with the popular classes. This interest, however, was not particular but was related to a long tradition of Brazilian cultural elites, which invested in ethnographic approaches to ground their political convictions and legitimize their conceptions of nationality. In Chaui’s critique and in some of Bo Bardi’s works, such as SESC Pompéia and the exhibitions she curated there, both of them engaged in an ethnographic search for the people to express their own ideas about the nation and its possible democratic paths. However, the rise of the neoliberal agenda and the return to power of political groups from the dictatorship period, this time elected, favored the conversion of the idealized political image of the ‘people’ into the stigmatized portrait of the bandit. Urban violence and poverty became related themes in public opinion and state violence was disguised and intensified under the guise of the Democratic State.