Between the Global and the Local. the Imaginary Project of Brazil Idealized By São Paulo Modernists in the 1920s.

Cornelius Castoriadis (1975), reflecting on the symbolic dimension of socio-historical processes, highlights “the creative power of the collective imaginary and its changes over the years”. In this paper, we present as an exemplary case an imaginary project for Brazil, conceived in the realm of the arts, along the lines of Mario de Andrade and Oswald de Andrade and the brushstrokes of Tarsila do Amaral, in São Paulo in the 1920s, but which was reinvigorated in other periods, inspiring innovative aesthetic expressions such as Tropicalismo, in the late 1960s, and the curatorship of the XXIV São Paulo Biennial in 1998. The São Paulo modernists in the 1920s, like their European avant-garde friends, proposed an articulation between art and life, as the foundation of a revolution in art that would extend to other spheres of social life. However, they did so in a distinct and singular way, which gains relevance when studied from a comparative perspective, with other avant-garde expressions, highlighting how the scope of the aesthetic movement of the avant-gardes is much broader than the restricted sphere of the European circuit, which confined most of the analyses until then. The goal of this presentation is to consider the proposal of the São Paulo modernists, their repercussions and interlocutions, taking as references the works of the three artists mentioned, which will be discussed from the global context of the historical avant-gardes, from which they are inseparable. In other words, the approach to modernism from a global perspective can contribute not only to a deeper understanding of this trend, but also to redimension much of the current readings around the avant-gardes, which certainly tend to increase their importance with the expansion of the universe of interlocutions in which they were constituted.