“As artificial as the world must have been when it was created.”

-Clarice Lispector, Brasília from Visão do Esplendor (1962) 

These are the words with which Ana Vaz frames her piece A Idade da Pedra, a reflection, in my perspective, on notions of artifice, national mythology, and material permanence. From the first decades of the twentieth century, the project of demarcating an imagined Brazilian nation operated on a platform of rupture: from the past, and, more importantly, from the European network of power. By the fall of the imperial period, nascent Brazil had little remaining:  as the República Velha suffered, Brazil’s first postcolonial iteration faced a greater amplification of political, social, and economic insecurity. 

Abolition and the fall of Brazil’s primary organizational structure, slavery, left in its wake a geopolitical space desperate to make sense of the remnants of its damning past. The solution, put forward by state-makers and reinforced by cultural producers, was to remove the stain of Brazil’s painful histories from the national record, to define the Brazilian people in relation to an imagined and attractively-palatable vision of modernity, and to progress from a purified version of the past towards an equally simplified version of the future. 

Modern Brazil began as a nation with no history; the production of a Brazilian sense of self relied on the negation of the past. It fell to state-makers and storytellers to create a narrative of national identity where there was none, to produce a mythos for a grand civilization that had no relics of great antiquity to hold onto. It therefore became a question of mythology, of artifice made permanent. “The Brazilian has no character,” Mário de Andrade wrote, “because he possesses neither civilization nor traditional consciousness.” A nation with no history is condemned to produce one. In place of a deep past, of remnants of ancient civility to be proud of, Brazil created its own - and it looked forward. In place of Rome, Brasília rose from the cerrado, the great laboratory of modernity, a monument to ideologies of momentum, to the forever country of the future.

But stone tells the true story of Brazil. Stone is the foundation of the Brazilian nation, the bedrock of both its colonial and modern history as well as its colonial and modernist mythologies. Brazil is a nation of rock, of diamond, gold, amethyst and peridot. Of soapstone thresholds leading into colonial homes, cool recesses for private contemplation or imperial administration. Stone made the Portuguese colonial world go round and defined its place in the global order. Then came poured concrete, the new monuments to order, progress, the ownership of modernity. The new basis for Brazilian national identity; the perceived domination of a territory named “the future.” 

But this history doesn’t refer to the stones of the dinosaurs, the quartzite serras rising high above the rolling hills of Minas Gerais, or the pits of colonial mines. This history doesn’t refer to the stones of Brazil’s indigenous peoples, gathered now within arbitrary demarcations of the modern era, products of a history over which they had no control; over which the natural world had no control. Brazil didn’t exist then, before these borders. These histories of stone are from a time before. 

Perhaps we can think of the sound of iron striking stone as the sound of Brazil’s history. The sound of chisels in a quarry, the sound of hammers splintering limestone, marble, granite. Also the sound of shackles, pulling or dragging along a smooth stone surface as Brazil’s four million slaves did laundry at natural pools for their masters, or lay sandstone sheets for roads to transport precious gems, themselves also pulled by enslaved peoples from deep shafts underground. 

It is also the sound of workers in neon jumpsuits, replacing sidewalk stones on Rua Santa Clara in Copacabana, or on any sidewalk around the country. The sound of iron hitting stone may be the true history of Brazil, ringing across the nation, morning, noon, and night. An unacknowledged soundscape, an unrecognized portal to periods before. 

The sound of Brazil’s millions of anonymous laborers. The literal miners of Brazil’s negated past, the actual builder’s of Brazil’s artificial present, the tradespeople who made material the monuments to Brazil’s forever unreachable future. 

Perhaps the stone, more than national narrative, more than mythos, more than art or literature, knows the full story.  

Pilar Dirickson Garrett

04.10.2020