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A video piece made by Sao Paulo based artist Ianni is on display in the first floor of the Maison Franco Japonaise. The video employs archival recorded interviews with Brasilia’s city planner Lucio Costa and architect Oscar Niemeyer. Brasilia was built in the spirit of Modernism in the late 1950s, in the hope that it would offer Brazil not only a new capital, but a bastion for wider modernization too. However, what soon emerges through the interviews on Ianni’s soundtrack is a political undercurrent teeming with unrest, discrimination, and death. We see sweeping curves of concrete casting shadows that seem, little by little, to hide within themselves the dark secrets of the city. Installed in the concrete and glass architecture of the Maison Franco Japonaise, Ianni’s film constructs a bridge between Brasilia and its current setting, simultaneously taking us there and encouraging us to notice our present surroundings. And in doing so, maybe we can begin to consider the politics latent in the built environments that form our own surroundings too, in Tokyo or wherever we have come from.
In this sense, Ianni’s reevaluation of Brasilia and its history shares an investigative thread with Duncan Campbell, whose experimental documentaries probe history from alternative standpoints and encourage us to rethink what previously seemed cast in historical ‘concrete.’ Campbell’s films are both on display in the Garden Hall and in a Screening program at the Maison Franco Japonaise. He will also be taking part in a Q&A session and a Lounge Talk later in the week. Please check the timetable for more details, and look out for future blog posts here.

At 3 pm on Monday, in the Maison Franco Japonaise’ auditorium, another experimental take on the film documentary genre will come to Ebisu, courtesy of Cesar Oiticica Filho. Filho offers a vivid and sensory portrait of his uncle, the film’s eponymous hero, renowned artist Helio Oiticica. Helio Oiticica (1937-1980) pioneered an avant-garde art practice that combined music, environmentalism, Modernist art, and street culture, and catalyzed collaborative ventures spanning between New York, Rio, and London. Through archival material and that which he filmed himself, Filho creates a patchwork of his uncle’s life and the colorful time in which he lived.

At 6.30 pm the auditorium will again provide the setting for a Brazilian adventure. This time, we will be taken right back to 1931 with a recently restored gem of early experimental film, Limite. Mario Peixoto directed only one film, and this is it. A meditation on trees and wind and water. One woman. Time captured in celluloid. Peixoto said that, in making this film, he wanted to show and not tell. Therefore conventional narrative gives way to a beautiful slice of life, more than eighty years ago.