Hallucinated Cities

São Paulo, Brasília, and Rio de Janeiro
October 3-14, 2012

Vesna Pavlović traveled to São Paulo, Brasília, and Rio de Janeiro as part of her ongoing research project, Hallucinated Cities. The project addresses the conflict between architectural and photographic representation, and how it relates to ideology in Brazilian modern architecture. Borrowing the title from a seminal volume of Mário de Andrade’s poems published in 1922, the project considers the photographic transformation of Brazilian modernist architectural objects from the 1930’s to today, and the conflict, which arises through such representations.

During her time in Brazil, she photographed important architectural monuments designed by Gregori Warchavchik, Rino Levi, Lucio Costa, Lina Bo Bardi, and Oscar Niemeyer, pioneers of Brazilian architectural modernism. She also became familiar with several photographic archives, including the Archive of the City Museum of São Paulo, Instituto Moreira Salles in Rio, and The Novacap Public Archive in Brasília.

Visit Vesna’s website at vesnapavlovic.com/