‘Here everything appears to be still in construction and is already a ruin’: rethinking ‘brasilidade’ in the work of Cerith Wyn Evans and Laercio Redondo

In 2009 at the 31st Panorama da Arte Brasileira, São Paulo, the Welsh artist Cerith Wyn Evans (b.1958) showed the work Aqui tudo parece que é ainda construção e já é ruína, a partir de ‘Fora da Ordem’ de Caetano Veloso (Here everything seems to be under construction and left in ruins, from ‘Fora da Ordem’ by Caetano Veloso) FIG. 1. One of many firework sculptures by Evans, the work speaks to such important aspects of Brazilian contemporaneity as the myth of futurity in Brazilian national discourse, which is at the core of the idea of brasilidade (Brazilianness). The myth of Brazil as the country of the future – intrinsically modern, lusciously tropical, racially democratic and economically and culturally rising – has, for over three centuries, been a symbol of utopianism and an engine in the reproduction of colonial relations of power. Although the phrase was coined in Stefan Zweig’s book Brazil: Land of the Future (1941), the narrative of Brazilian futurity long predates this and can be traced back to Portugal’s myths about its own predestined future.¹ Its fundamental elements – Edenic and developmentalist motifs, celebrations of Brazil’s tropical destiny and its peoples’ racial tolerance – have continued to feature in the twenty-first-century nationalist discourse, especially with the ever-growing reliance on a fiction of modernity that relentlessly propels the country’s resource extraction economy and the exploitation of its most vulnerable populations.