The foundation stone that marks the spot where Brazil’s new capital was going to be built is not in fact a stone. The obelisk, emblematically inaugurated at midday on the 7th of September, 1922, and made of reinforced concrete painted in white, finds itself caught midway between two periods: the colonial past, when cities spread outwards from public squares with their crosses and pillories, and a modern future designed around a city-image of vast spaces, its sculptural edifices no longer rising up around the cross, but rather over it. Some hold that the insistent appearance of obelisks in our public squares represents a sort of reminiscence, of a memory of these old pillories.

It was while looking at a little-viewed, insignificant, and slightly suspect monument, that I began to sketch out this exhibition — in the smile that came to my face imagining politicians and famous people unveiling the “Pedra Fundamental da futura capital dos Estados Unidos do Brasil” [“Fundamental Stone of the Future Capital of the United States of Brazil”], which, let’s agree, isn’t terribly well put together. Later, having given it a little more thought, I arrived at another conclusion. Maybe there wasn’t any sort of commemoration at the site, and the foundation stone was just set in place by a group of workers who arrived there at the end of a long and arduous journey. They must have been there for a few days, under an unforgiving sun, with little drinking water, sleeping in improvised shacks. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the country, this feat was being toasted around a groaning table. My smile disappeared. I never found out what happened at the inauguration, or if there even was one. Nor did I try to find out. I don’t know if the event was celebrated at all in Rio de Janeiro, or if it inspired conspiracies and protests against the mark that signaled the city’s demotion from its place as capital with a view to connecting the north and south of the country.

I kept on looking at that palid foundation stone that had frustrated my expectations of encountering a huge raw piece of rock with just one of its faces polished to bear some inscription or accommodate a plaque. I thought that a stone worthy of respect, from birth, as João Cabral de Melo Neto wrote, should “enter the soul” from birth, should hold on to the idea of a site that remains untouched by human settlement or by inorganic time. Staring insistently at the white of its surface, under the intense and blinding light of the Cerrado, it becomes difficult to perceive the imperfections in its manufactured edges and turns the obelisk into a brilliant allegory of carnival.

Thus, I understood that Brasília’s foundation stone was a representation, a model or architectural model of a generic monument (the obelisk), whose whiteness might only serve to hide the marks left in the concrete by workers’ fingertips and the precarious molds used in its construction. In short, the white served to erase this foundation. I realized that this sad monument smuggled, strangely and silently, economic and social activities that had come from Brazil’s colonial past. It was more than an architectural model. It was almost a rehearsal for what would come next; the construction of Brasília.

In 1922, the reinforced concrete the obelisk was made from was still a relatively fresh technology, and undoubtedly whoever designed it had not foreseen that this would be the predominant technique employed in the future capital’s construction, far less the reaches that an artistic (architect’s) imagination could take it to. In 1922 the fundamental problems that faced civil construction in the country, and those that colonial Brazil had confronted, were not that different, primarily: smuggling, diversion and overpricing of materials, touch up jobs, ornamental distractions of all kinds, the exploitation of workers’ bodies, precariousness and inventiveness. Suddenly, looking even closer at Brasilia’s disappointing foundation stone, I realized it had become a kind of giant oracle, just as anything does if you look at it closely enough, if you start to ponder its history and function, its foundations. Like Aleph by Jorge Luiz Borges or Brás Cubas’ death delirium, I saw in the obelisk an avalanche of times and images, from the churches in Minas Gerais covered in gold leaf, and the story of the saint of the hollow stick, to the piles upon piles of wood used in the molds to manufacture the reinforced concrete that would give Brasilia its unique appearance. All of which led me to think of the various improvised solutions dreamt up during the construction period. I saw the light white models of the buildings and their real concrete weight. I saw that all was image, desire, illusion, allegory, bodies and brute weight, from the very beginning - made by hand.