Brasilia: concrete poetry in (re)verse

Just as a poem emerges from the page, the vastness of the Cerrado savanna was a blank page when Brasilia was designed and built. Even before construction work started, poets were already looking to the city for their inspiration, whether it was Carlos Drummond on Lúcio Costa's plans or Joaquim Cardozo on the curves pictured by Niemeyer. And nothing has changed since. There are still many poets who sing the praises of this innovative, beautiful city. A visual beauty that we also find reproduced on banknotes, coins, and medals.

Money is a country's business card, with its national symbols, its historical figures, and its cultural and natural heritage on prominent display. As tools used for bartering, banknotes and coins build a collective narrative, just like language. As they both represent the real on the symbolic plane, there are points where the worlds of money and poetry draw closer, touch, and overlap. Just like the axes that gave rise to Brasilia.

Brasilia was born at an intersection, from two lines crossing. Two lines crossing, two directions, four compass points, four bearings; two lines crossing: a shake of the hand, a sign of peace, of understanding, of friendliness between people.

Joaquim Cardozo

The big city was just beginning to be built, in a semi-wilderness, on the plateau: the magical sameness, the thin air.

João Guimarães Rosa

(...) A seed
That is planted in clear weather,
In the evening ground will be lost,
Now it is born, finally rising
Orderly in iron and stone.

Joaquim Cardozo

nto the hard concrete, of steel and concrete,
Brasilia is grafted and kept alive,
that porous almost fleshy masonry
of the fazenda house in old Brazil.

João Cabral de Melo Neto

We have the eighth wonder
"Brasilia, capital of hope”.

Capitão Furtado

The moon's craters are there, in Brasilia. Brasilia's beauty lies in its invisible statues.

Clarice Lispector

Unlike the cities that are shaped and adapted to the landscape, here, in the bleak savanna set against an immense sky, just like out on the open ocean, the city created the landscape

Lucio Costa

I'd never seen anything like it anywhere in the world. I'd never seen anything like it anywhere in the world.

Clarice Lispector

You lie far from the sea, but you lie close
to the sky, to a clear sky that must always be open
to our sorrows and to our songs, to the wind.
That tomorrow's man can have a sense,
of loving your beautiful landscapes,
and can, through his courage, be worthy of them.
City that broke free from the waves and the shores
to get close to the stars.

Osvaldo Orico