Tamar Guimarães

Canoas

Canoas by Tamar Guimarães is a film made for the 2010 São Paulo Biennial as an exercise in the projection of national identity, made during a time of great optimism about Brazil’s future. The main subject and setting of the film is Casa das Canoas, a home that architect Oscar Niemeyer built for himself in the early 1950s. Overlooking the bay on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, the building has achieved iconic status in Brazil. Although a private residence, it served as an important site for cultural gatherings of Brazil’s elite and international guests. The film Canoas restages a glamorous cocktail party with actors and non-actors at the residence in which dancing and drinking punctuate conversations about modernity, social housing, political dictatorship and artistic exile. Framing the festivities is the movement and interaction of servants as they prepare for the party and then leave for their own homes in the morning. And it is here in these small transitional moments that Guimarães’s work is most critical, speaking directly to the contradictions inherent in the famed architect’s creations and the failed promise of modernity as expressed between the disparity between the labor and leisure classes. Aimed to produce an architecture that was for the people and a better future, the conditions and context that produced Niemeyer’s work also further entrenched the social and class divisions in Brazil.