Beautiful Horizons Explained

Dusk over Belo Horizonte

The story of how I ended up as Professor Titular in Belo Horizonte begins in Sheffield in 2008. In the late seventies and eighties I was a frequent visitor to Leeds. I had friends in the Art School and legendary music scene and saw many a band,  most memorably the Fall at their prime grinding out Live at the Witch Trials. For some reason I never visited steel city next door, home to the Human League and a  notorious modernist housing scheme, Park Hill - a  ‘streets in the sky’ exemplar of concrete social idealism, ruinously abandoned in its adolescence, and subsequently reborn as speculative real estate. I was attending the conference, Alternate Currents, devoted to different ways of thinking about architecture. My own contribution, The Glimmer of Other Worlds, set out to answer the sort of questions I have often been asked about alternatives to the capitalist city.  Predictably, it included references to the Soviet avant-garde, the Paris Commune of 1871, and the Barcelona anarchist revolution of 1936. The keynote lecture was given by two Brasilians, Silke Kapp and Ana Paula Baltazar who presented their on-going project MOM, Morar de Outras Maneiras, Living in Other Ways, a radical critique of the capitalist production of space that was illustrated with a sequence of images of Belo Horizonte inhabited by spectral images of Marx.[i] We immediately hit it off, and that is when the adoption proceedings began. In 2012 they invited me to give a series of lectures and the conversations have continued ever since. The history of building production, literary architecture, the collective ownership of land, and always hovering in the background, the great bard. Ten years later, and somewhat remarkably, since in an all too familiar story, Bolsonaro cut fifty percent of funding for the Humanities, I find myself  in the tropics, running classes on architecture and narrative construction. I’m also collaborating on an illustrated book about the environmental and social history of mining and more generally what is termed extrativismo, the process of intensive resource extraction that has continued unabated in Latin America for five hundred years. This is why you can look forward over the coming months to a number of stories that take you into the monstrous world of neo-colonial exploitation, environmental devastation, and corporate greed. If you’ve never read anything about this tale of abject horror, then Eduardo Galeano’s 1971 classic, The Open Veins of Latin America, is a good place to start, along with I might add Marx’s essay in Capital Volume 1, Primitive Accumulation, So-Called.

[i] The collective and collected works of MOM can be found at their website, www.mom.arq.ufmg.br.