In 2002, the Association Française d’Action Artistique, a French organization funding emerging artists and art exchanges, supported the residency of Louidgi Beltrame at Toronto’s Vtape, during which he produced and exhibited Vertical Island (2003), a film-installation-cum-abstract-meditation-on-desire intersecting with the built environment of Toronto. With Beltrame’s camera trained on the not yet condo-towered skyline of Toronto, the work is smart, yet sweetly innocent. We might have all believed, as Le Corbusier did, that “architecture is the learned game…of forms assembled in the light.”
Over the past decade, Beltrame’s practice has continued to develop in intriguing ways. With a heightened interest in the ability of fiction to elucidate and clarify architectural forms and meanings, he continues to explore the impact of design and architecture on the psychological space of increasingly globalized citizens. For the past decade, the Paris-based artist has focused his acutely aware camera-based gaze on the relics of High Modernism that populate the world. Shrines to both beauty and ego, these structures speak to the hubris of their creators and their material humility, as time carries out its inevitable reclamation project on each once-grand structure.
In April 2013, Vtape invited Beltrame to return to Toronto and present Brasilia/Chandigarh (2008), a rumination on two capitals, and two monuments to Modernism. Brasilia, the administrative capital of Brazil, was built by Oscar Niemeyer in the late 1950s. Chandigarh was built more or less simultaneously by Le Corbusier in India. The two cities yielded rich histories worthy of Beltrame’s attention.
Part thriller, part romance, Brasilia/Chandigarh opens enigmatically. A single guitar note intones. We are inside a darkened dome-shaped structure. Cut to a young man walking through an open field in the shadow of a tall, abandoned building. We hear the sound of bugs—millions of bugs buzzing and whirring with life. Now we are on a flat roof in an equally flat, watery landscape. The bugs are here, too. We draw close to a young man’s face. He is lying face up, eyes closed. Is he dead? Sleeping? Cut to tracking shots that show a pensive young woman in a sari making her way through a series of built forms; passing from sunlight to shadow, she enters a space occupied by a huge 35-mm film projector, that behemoth of cinematic apparatus. With her, we enter the theatre, and with her, we encounter a lit but as-yet blank screen, a surface quivering with anticipation, waiting to receive an image.
With this economical montage (running less than three minutes), Beltrame has delivered us to the real location that this work occupies: the place and space of cinema. In his classic book What Is Cinema?, André Bazin cites André Malraux’s idea that “…it was montage that gave birth to film as an art, setting it apart from mere animated photography, in short, creating a language.” This is the language that Beltrame uses to sketch dual portraits of these two Modernist monuments. Brasilia/Chandigarh is essentially an essay film, in that it comprises documentary and fictional elements. We observe both cities from the points of view of the protagonists: the young Indian women (there are two of them) in Chandigarh who join each other, and a young man in Brasilia with a camera. As they travel through their separate locations, these protagonists lead us on architectural tours, some half-century after the cities’ respective births. In Chandigarh, we roam through the streets in the company of the young women, who know it well and move in and out of landmark buildings, climb towers, cross public squares and at times review the history of the city’s planning and construction. In Brasilia, the young man’s journey is one of frustration, as the sheer scale of the city denies him access and defies understanding. Often, he is shown to be tiny in comparison with the buildings he is trying to capture with his camera; sometimes, he appears almost ant-like, his body miniscule in relation to the showy geometric forms designed by Niemeyer, signifiers of the future that now live in the present.
Hints of a story emerge: someone named Nicolas has disappeared from his hotel. His papers have been sent to one of the young women; the women read from them and try to piece something together. But this is no Agatha Christie script. The “story” is a screen that masks the artwork, allowing the “characters” to perform within their spheres while we get on with unravelling the real mystery: how did these two gigantic marvels of Modernist idealism come to inhabit these isolated spots?
Through the use of carefully modulated montage, we gain knowledge of the distinct contrast between the two planned utopian cities. Over and over, we see Chandigarh’s peopled public spaces and hear the sounds of a populated urban environment, scenes contrasted with the often completely empty spaces of Brasilia. The two women seem intimately involved with Chandigarh’s structures and forms; the young man in Brasilia is always outside, dwarfed by the perfect forms, snapping picture after picture, seemingly desperate to understand the buildings through representations. Chandigarh, for all its problems, is a real, functioning city with inhabitants from all economic classes. Brasilia is essentially a stage set for the government to act out its function within, with the poor banished to a wide swathe of satellite cities that encircle the city centre.
Early on, the two women stroll around the perimeter of a playing field near structures that are clearly domestic. Here, a group of boys plays an informal game of cricket. Interestingly, at this point, Beltrame lets the “real” audio track recede behind the boisterous cries of the playing children. That is, the scene begins with a shot of the two Indian women walking; we hear one of them reading a passage from Nicolas’s papers, in which he compares the domestic housing styles of Chandigarh. Perhaps this is the topic of his research? But the audio of the woman reading recedes, dominated by the din of the cricket-playing children.
The scene signals Beltrame’s intention to use fiction as an “open” system of description, one that allows the viewer to enter the sites and compare them. The architectural wonders are never simply buildings; they are containers for lives, fluid and porous. Brasilia/Chandigarh’s characters carry the story of these sites more effectively than a strict documentary record of each city would do. This story slows the viewer down. We puzzle over relationships, trying to keep the narrative thread. All the while, the montage brings the two sites into dialogue, but it is a dialogue haunted by the ghosts of the shared histories of the colonialist past, redolent with memories of the promised progress and prosperity inherent within Modernism’s ethos. Brasilia/Chandigarh is neither a celebration nor a critique of Modernist architecture. Rather, it is a carefully recorded, clearly structured observation of the two sites.
Chandigarh was the first planned city built in India after 1947 independence. Jawaharlal Nehru, then prime minister, took a special interest in the relatively small northern capital city, calling it the “temple of new India” in his dedication speech in 1953. The resulting commission was shared among a large number of architectural collaborators, but it is the renowned Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier who is credited with the overall Modernist profile of the major public structures, such as the High Court of Punjab and Haryana, with its splashes of colourful concrete on the long facade, and the Palace of Assembly, with its circular meeting chamber. Throughout, concrete is celebrated in its most brutalist and crude form, ornamented with sculptural details but never disguised.
Likewise, Brasilia was the project of a politician looking for an architectural legacy. When Juscelino Kubitschek was elected president of Brazil in 1955 on the slogan “fifty years of progress in five,” he accelerated a long-planned national scheme to locate the new capital in the interior of the country, away from Rio de Janeiro and the pall of its colonial past. Kubitschek commissioned a master plan for the new capital from Lucio Costa, who turned to Brazilian architect Niemeyer for the design of all the major buildings. Seen today, Brasilia’s national congress, cathedral, cultural complex and supreme federal court all bear Niemeyer’s distinctive mark. All are monumental in scale, embracing the sensuous, curving forms Niemeyer is famous for. Seen from the air, the city is a huge map of Modernism, with white, half-spherical forms resting between precisely strutted towers, and hyperboloid structures surrounded by perfectly flat plazas and pristine reflecting pools.
Two dream cities by two world-famous architects. Now, almost a half-century later, both cities lie uneasily in the landscape like concrete memorials to the ideals of their creators; gestures of post-colonial independence and visions of future national identities lie unrealized. As three fictional characters roam restlessly through these two enormously grand signs of modernity, the geometries of Brasilia and Chandigarh coalesce into the fabric of the film Brasilia/Chandigarh.
In a recent public discussion with Beltrame on the occasion of the opening of Brasilia/Chandigarh in Toronto, architectural historian and theorist Andy Payne suggested that Beltrame’s work seeks to unfold the critical potential latent in fiction, saying the work also points to the fact that “something has happened irrevocably and irremissibly and we are living in the shadow of its having happened.” The “something” in Brasilia/Chandigarh is most certainly Modernist architecture’s hubristic imposition onto the tabula rasae of the open sites in Brazil and India, treating them as sleeping giants, just waiting for the touch of genius imparted by architects and planners.
One more recent work warrants discussion in this context. In Cinelândia, made with collaborator Elfi Turpin in 2012, Beltrame returns to Niemeyer. Using a Super 8 camera and a claustrophobic shooting style, the artist examines Casa das Canoas in all its curving sensuality. This is Niemeyer’s glass house, built in 1953 in the jungle above Rio de Janeiro but virtually unoccupied by the family it was created for (his own). In this literal “land of cinema,” again featuring an actual film projector as a character, the fiction is generated from both built and natural landscapes. With texts by Michelangelo Antonioni (a never-produced film script), J.G. Ballard and Marguerite Duras, along with an anthropologist’s tale of cannibals, the film features voices that multiply into a spiralling structure, spinning fiction and architecture into a danse macabre. Cinelândia leaves no doubt that the “shadow” being cast is Death itself, as Modernism, Progress, Reason and Rationality—all those promises of the Enlightenment—collapse into a fever-induced coma of contingency. With all of his moving-image work of the past decade, Louidgi Beltrame’s elegant visual and aural compositions stand as poetic eulogies for mid-century Modernism, its promises and its disappointments, its beauty and its failures.
Brasilia/Chandigarh was presented in cooperation with the 2013 Images Festival in Toronto. Louidgi Beltrame’s participation was presented in partnership with the Consulat général de France à Toronto with support from the Institut français as part of the year-long, multi-venue festival Paris-Toronto.
This is an article from the Fall 2013 issue of Canadian Art. To read more from this issue, including more articles about Paris-Toronto, please view that issue’s table of contents. If you are in Toronto, you may also wish to join us for a free, related symposium The Ecology of an Art Scene on November 8 and 9 at Harbourfront Centre and Toronto City Hall.
