Felipe Cama

RIO XXI - VERTENTES CONTEMPORÂNEAS – BY Paulo Herkenhoff

Rio, histories of gardens and landscapes

Rio de Janeiro has an extraordinary ability to invent its symbols and to exert multiple fascinations on its visitors. It is the Brazilian city with the densest history of gardens, from the beginning of colonization to the creation of artists in the 21st century. The oldest remaining gardens are monastery gardens, such as those of the Franciscan Convent of Santo Antônio, the Monastery of São Bento and the Convent of Santa Tereza das Clarissas, all established according to the rules of their orders. In the Grammaire des Arts du Dessin: Architecture, Sculpture, Peinture, Charles Blanc says vegetables, flowers, fruit trees, and rare plants were planted in the abbeys, but the Benedictines, one of the most self-serving orders, “had terraces, sidewalks, decks, and platbands; the composition of their gardens was as simple and regular as their life”.1 Other historical landmarks are Mestre Valentim’s Public Promenade and, since the 19t h century, the Botanical Garden, with its palm tree alley, in the neoclassical architectural discipline. Blanc adds that the purpose of gardens is to introduce order into the free creations of nature.2 The splendor of the Atlantic Forest was interpreted by the Count of Clarac or described by Auguste de Saint-Hilaire. The Tijuca Forest was reduced to charcoal and devastated by coffee expansion until it was reforested by Dom Pedro II in the mid-19t h century. In Parque Lage there are still traces of the original forest. Then, the romantic outline of the sinuosity, the naturalistic furnishings, and the bucolic costumes of François Marie Glaziou, the imperial arborist, who leaves his designs at Quinta da Boa Vista and at the reforms of the Public Promenade and Campo de Santana. There is nothing equivalent in Brazil. (…)

Felipe Cama is a visual narrator by groups of images under a formal or thematic focus,ringing together up to 30 figures. In Avenida das Palmeiras Imperiais (Rua Paissandu) he uses the photographic prints of representations of the street that in the times of the Empire led from Flamengo beach to the entrance of the Guanabara Palace, the residence of Princess Isabel. The palm trees were planted by order of D. Pedro II and the street was named in memory of the capture of the city of Paysandú by Brazilian troops in the Triple Alliance War that year. The work shuffles social times and plant growth phases. Cama proposes a gestalt view of the set of nine scenes in varying dimensions of the alley of the Roystonea oleracea species, perceived as a group of more of the same, as a repetition moved by small differences, to later claim attention to the study detail of the phenomenon of vision. and their reading errors.

Originally published on Rio XXI - Vertentes Contemporâneas (2019). Org. Paulo Herkenhoff. Published by FGV, Brazil