Rio de Monumentos

CURADORIA

Davi Aroeira Kacowicz

It is common to associate the word “monumental” with something magnificent, imposing, and grandiose. This adjective derives from the word “monument,” of Greco-Latin origin, which means to remember, alert, and advise. However, a monument does not need to be stunning to fulfill its primary function, which is to remind the living of an event, an idea, a group of people, or a biography. Its importance resides, above all, in evoking in the public the act of remembering, transforming something or someone into an icon.

There is no large city in the world that does not have its monuments, whether they be statues, sculptures, monoliths, etc. But in Brazil, no other city possesses as many landmarks of memory as Rio de Janeiro. In the squares, avenues, and other public thoroughfares of the Fluminense capital, there are hundreds of monuments marking ideologies, imaginaries, political projects, and aesthetic sensibilities of diverse moments over the last five centuries. They are pieces of stone and metal coated by layers of history.

And perhaps, precisely because of the large number of these pieces, there is a certain trivialization surrounding them, diminishing the questioning of who the represented person is, who produced it, when and why. It is always good to remember that all memory is a dialogue with the present.

Every past was once a present. For that very reason, the contextualization and knowledge of the history of these monuments is fundamental for their significance and recognition in current times.

Heroes and patriotic symbols are exchanged with the speed of a change in government or regime, and the idols and references of our cultural imaginary are also renewed. Thus, we perceive a set of historical values (religious, political, cultural), represented in a plastic manner. The material, size, arrangement, and allocation of these objects say much about the intentions of those who built them. “Every image tells a story,” said the English historian Peter Burke. Therefore, it would not be absurd to say that from every monument, various stories emanate.

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Ídolos em bronze

In recent decades, the monuments erected in the city of Rio de Janeiro have ceased to follow an eminently political bias and have begun to favor writers, poets, and musicians. The choice of icons of our culture as deserving of being immortalized in bronze resonates with a renewal in the very understanding of the social function of a monument. Instead of idolizing rulers and members of institutional power, Rio has begun to revere names that inspire and feed the collective cultural imaginary.

After the redemocratization process of the 1980s, a new understanding of the importance of culture in Rio's social and identity-building process guided public and private initiatives in installing monuments across the city. There were indeed tributes of this kind before this period — the statue of Carlos Gomes, unveiled in 1960, is one example — but nothing compares to the boom of these statues in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s.

Not all of the honorees were born in Rio de Janeiro. The statues of the cariocas Tom Jobim, Pixinguinha and Noel Rosa share the urban space with Carlos Drummond, Luiz Gonzaga and Dorival Caymmi — just to mention a few examples. But their biographies are intertwined with the history of the city, making Rio the cultural capital of the country. And in contrast to the grandiose statues, of a contemplative character, many of the monuments to our cultural icons are at ground level, sitting on a bench, at a bar table, walking along the beachfront. Accessible to the public as common beings, yet immortal.

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