In all these years of research, modernist photography has always made me think of concrete poetry. With the mania of a curator, I have imagined them together on a wall, helping to promote this mixture — at the same time obvious and unusual — and helping to pull the thread of a story. Being familiar with Jorge’s house, it was always in the shelter of its spaces that I would wake up — the slightly undulating walls in which the approximation between the processes of photography and poetry would also extend naturally to design and architecture and to whatever else combined with what I called the soirée of Brazilian modernist utopias. This soirée.

Why soirée? I would ask myself. First of all, for the soul of the house, and then for the libertarian circulation of ideas in the articulations that begin to emerge between an image by José Yalenti and another by Jean Manzon and the pilot-plan for Brasília, moving from Niemeyer and the Maracanã, and the Pétala [Petal] coffee table by the host, Jorge Zalszupin — all meeting up as if at a party.

 And utopian, why? I recalled Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano, in As Palavras Andantes [Walking Words], for whom utopia serves to make us move along — watch out for the steps in the transition between rooms here on the first floor. 

Modernism comes in the wake of this very concept, of movement towards a place we will never really reach, not to detract from all the adventure contained in the idea of refinement, of improvement, in the desire to exercise an identity of its own. 

In my only flash of pretension in encouraging this revelry, I will appeal to the intellectual support of the art critic and political activist Mário Pedrosa (1900-1981), for whom, in Brazil, we are “condemned to the modern”. In this soirée-on-the-walls, reflection is what generates movement.

Iatã Cannabrava