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BRASÍLIA TEIMOSA - Exhibition at the ICA takes a close up of a stubborn community

Brasília Teimosa seems like an accident: a lower-class neighbourhood in Recife which doesn’t cling to the edge of the city but skirts the seafront on one of the city’s most expensive stretches of real estate. For over four decades, the area has been dotted with rows of wooden shacks on stilts spilling onto the popular tourist beach, Boa Viagem. The locals are the distant relatives of the sailors who, in the 50s, refused to move out of the area (which had been set aside as a public dump) reconstructing their houses overnight after the authorities had knocked them down during the day. ‘Teimoso’ literally means ‘stubborn’, and refers to the locals’ tenacious stance; ‘Brasília’ has to do with the fact that the fishermen took a stand just as the federal capital was being constructed.

“On January 30, 1957, five fishermen from a colony in the North-eastern city of Recife arrived in Rio de Janeiro after having traveled more than a thousand miles by sea over 35 days. Their purpose was to attend the official inauguration ceremony of the newly elected president Juscelino Kubitschek and to ask him for protection, as their community lived under the constant threat of eviction. They returned by plane, as their inbound experience was described as ‘harsh’, bringing with them 11 engines donated by the government to power their boats. This was perhaps the first documented episode in the history of what later became known as ‘Stubborn Brasília’”, tell Kiki Mazzucchelli, the exhibition curator of Brasília Teimosa (which opens at the ICA on 12th April). “Located right between the celebrated beach of Boa Viagem and the historical centre of Recife, Brasília Teimosa is today a real estate hot spot; a natural stretch for the expansion of the five star hotels that already overcrowd Boa Viagem”, adds Kiki.

The community remained invisible to the middle class until an urbanization project in 2004 removed the region’s fragile wooden buildings and led to a new avenue dubbed ‘Brasília Formosa’, which in no time at all became a hit with sun-seekers across the city who would flock down to the beach on Sundays with their families.

The idea of capturing the transformation taking place in the lives of these people fulfilled an old desire to photograph this community in their own context, which is so visually replete with contradictions, and questions so many social norms. I started taking photos in 2005, commissioned by a local cultural foundation that felt that the work would make an interesting exhibition for an art gallery in the state of Pernambuco.