Place of Speech: The Casa do Povo
The exterior of Casa do Povo (image: André Penteado).
In contrast to the early-20th century skyscrapers of downtown São Paulo, or the gated high-rise apartment buildings of the city’s newer suburbs, Bom Retiro is a squat neighbourhood. Its shortness should not, however, be mistaken for insignificance. The lowlying district falls in the geographical centre of the megalopolis, just north of Luz station, and owes its morphology to an industrial history that was vital to the development of São Paulo. Old warehouses speak to the role that coffee played in the city’s late-19th century economic boom, while the garment industry that dominated in the 20th century continues to thrive: whole blocks are devoted to stores selling beads, fringing and fabric.
Amidst these markers of industry are symbols of the industrious – those immigrants who alighted at Luz station from the 1880s onwards to profit from the growing coffee market and have populated Bom Retiro ever since. Today, the neighbourhood is home to tens of thousands of Koreans, as well as new waves of Bolivians and Paraguayans, and has housed significant populations of Greeks, Lebanese, Syrians, Italians and eastern European Jews. It is this latter group whose influence, at least on the area’s architecture and design, remains most visible. Along ruas Talmud Thorá and Lubavitch, and their adjacent streets, are synagogues, kosher restaurants and the Casa do Povo.
The printing workshop.
Walking past the Casa do Povo (House of the People), you might be forgiven for not giving it a second glance; a wide staircase behind a generously glazed entranceway, peppered with posters, suggests a relatively mundane school building. Viewed from the Korean supermarket across the street, however, the building takes on a more monumental quality, thanks to a concrete arch that rises through two and a half storeys of the elevation and interrupts the otherwise rectilinear character of the thoroughly modernist facade. First opened in 1953, the Casa do Povo was designed to consolidate the cultural life of the politically progressive Jewish community that had grown in Bom Retiro through waves of immigration from Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Germany and elsewhere during the 1910s-40s. During these decades, the Yidisher Kultur Farband (Jewish Culture Association), an organised anti-fascist cultural movement, began to spread through Jewish communities around the world. Growing out of the Paris Antifascist Congress of 1935, the network encouraged the founding of cultural organisations – theatres, libraries, newspapers, schools – to support Jewish communities in the fight against global fascism. Bom Retiro was no exception and the neighbourhood became home to initiatives including the Scholem Aleichem Israelite school, amateur Yiddish theatre groups, and the Nossa Voz (Our Voice) newspaper.
The end of the Second World War marked a turning point for this dispersed network of groups in Bom Retiro, albeit in a rather unexpected way. Benjamin Seroussi, the current director of Casa do Povo, explains that the defeat of Nazism came to be seen as a moment of celebration, not simply a time to mourn the destruction wrought by the Holocaust. “The narrative was, ‘We won the war, how to celebrate?’” he says. “There was a need to bring together all these associations in one building and to build a monument to those who died in the Shoah[…] Instead of just building a cultural centre or making a memorial, they decided to create a living monument – an empty space where to remember is to act.”
Printed matter from the centre’s workshop.
This empty space would come to be the fourstorey structure that today stands relatively unchanged, nearly 70 years since it opened. Designed by Ernest Robert de Carvalho Mange – a one-time intern of Le Corbusier and native Paulista, whose wife Sarah Friedman was a prominent member of the Casa do Povo community and the Brazilian Communist Party – the building is a concrete-framed hulk that is peppered with the high-modernist ideas of his mentor: a free facade, a roof garden, raised ground floor and free-plan floor plates.
Today the building has the familiar ambience of an old school hall. Its open spaces bear marks from decades of varied community uses, with scratched floorboards, peeling paintwork and the paraphernalia of numerous activities paused mid-sentence: loose chairs, books, mannequins. The Casa housed a school for its first three decades, practising Montessori-style experimental pedagogy for under-15s, alongside other early users, such as a Yiddish choir and a Brechtian theatre group who performed in the full-scale theatre in the building’s basement (the only out-of-action part of the site today). Photographs from the time show packed dinners, social gatherings and exercise classes on the roof. Meanwhile, remaining true to the leftist politics at its core, the Casa also hosted avant-garde performances, debated Zionism and became a stronghold of resistance during the Brazilian dictatorship; some teachers at the school were arrested and tortured, and Nossa Voz was forced to close in 1964.
The ground-floor hall of the Casa do Povo.
Rather than signal an optimistic new dawn, the end of the military dictatorship in 1985 coincided with a period of regression at Casa do Povo. The school stopped using the building in 1981; its student numbers had dropped as a result of dictatorial oppression, the deterioration of the nearby downtown area, and the subsequent move of large portions of the Jewish community to other neighbourhoods, such as the more affluent Higienópolis. “The worse Brazil is, the better Casa do Povo is,” chuckles Seroussi. “It’s more a joke than anything else, but it is true that we are more relevant in adverse contexts.” The Casa struggled through the 1990s and early 00s, although it never closed and continued to host disparate events and groups. The Yiddish choir kept rehearsing, a poorly attended film club rented DVDs to watch together and a Korean church group used the first floor. But the departure of the school and the end of the dictatorship had brought about a surprising symbolic loss. “When the dictatorship ended, the place somehow lost its enemy,” says Seroussi.
Today, of course, there is a new enemy. The Casa do Povo in the era of Jair Bolsonaro is a reinvigorated place. Its latent radical and critical energy seems to have burst forth following its years in hibernation – as though its rich history of resistance to fascism was preserved in its concrete frame (and, of course, in its Yiddish choir). Today, the Casa’s busy calendar – which features psychoanalysis, yoga, theatre, a print studio, artist installations and much more – is largely down to the directorial approach of Seroussi, whose previous experience in cultural programming for the São Paulo Art Biennial and Centro da Cultura Judaica contrasts with the relative amateurism of those who preceded him when he joined in 2013. “The organisation was a totally derelict situation,”he explains, “There was a group of old people with very good intentions, who were quite courageous but not really knowing what to do with the institution. They knew it was important to maintain, because it was built as a monument to those who died in the Shoah, against fascism.” A major part of his subsequent work has been to re-situate the institution’s Jewish and anti-fascist tradition within the changing neighbourhood, city and broader cultural context. “It’s like finding a hammer on the table, but its users have disappeared and there are no nails,” he explains. “I’m using this hammer and I have to deduce the user and the nail to work out how this tool can be relevant today.”
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The question of institutional relevance – particularly from a Jewish perspective – is a fascinating one in the context of Bolsonaro’s Brazil. According to a 2019 report on antisemitism in the country by the Brazilian Center of Studies in Law and Religion for the UN, incidences of “hate speech” or “hostility” against Jews exist in “specific and isolated cases, mostly on Internet and online social networks”. The report goes on to state that “the Jewish community has good relations and dialogue with the Brazilian government[…] and it is generally safe in the country”. This amenable relationship represents a significant contrast to Bolsonaro’s relationships with other minority groups, which have been defined by attacks on indigenous, afro-Brazilian and immigrant rights. Indeed, Seroussi suggests there exists a “philosemitism, or a philo-Judaism” in the midst of Bolsonaro’s otherwise evangelically Christian-infused political ideology. This ties into the broader “Unusual Relationship” between evangelical Christians and Jews that was described by the academic Yaakov Ariel in his 2013 book of the same name. Ariel writes of an “unprecedented devotion toward the Jews as God’s chosen people and as heirs and continuers of historical Israel” by evangelical Christians, who remain “confident that the Jews will eventually come to recognize Jesus as their Lord and savior”. What’s more, Bolsonaro’s “philo-semitism” chimes with his invocation of an apparent Brazilian “Judeo-Christian tradition”, as he put it in his presidential inauguration speech. However, as the historian Udi Greenberg wrote in The New Republic last year, this notion of the “Judeo-Christian” tradition has been used for exclusionary and reactionary political purposes in the United States, typically as a code for whiteness, and “as a cover for a very specific Christian (and mostly evangelical) agenda, especially on education and abortion”. He continues: “Some thinkers on the radical right even rely on it while spreading antiSemitic conspiracy theories.”
Benjamin Seroussi, director of the Casa do Povo.
In the current Brazilian context, this rings true. Not only does an imagined “Judeo-Christian” Brazil reinforce Bolsonaro’s anti-indigenous and racist politics, it also provides cover for antisemitic actions, some more explicit than others. During a trip to visit Israel and his right-wing ally Benjamin Netanyahu in 2019, Bolsonaro publicly supported an antisemitic theory espoused by his minister of foreign affairs Ernesto Araújo, that Nazism “had fundamental traits that recommend classifying it on the left of the political spectrum”. More recently, and even more outrageously, Bolsonaro’s then-culture minister Roberto Alvim directly invoked the language of Nazism while announcing a new national art award in a video published on Twitter. Facing the camera from behind his desk, flanked by a Brazilian flag and a patriarchal cross (while overlooked by a portrait of Bolsonaro), Alvim outlined his vision for a national culture to “save” the youth of Brazil. Via what he later described as a “rhetorical coincidence”, Alvim went on to quote Joseph Goebbels: “The Brazilian art of the next decade will be heroic and will be national, will be endowed with great capacity for emotional involvement[…] deeply linked to the urgent aspirations of our people, or else it will be nothing,” he proclaimed. By comparison, in 1933 Goebbels is reported to have announced to a group of theatre managers and directors that “The German art of the next decade will be heroic[…] it will be national with great pathos and binding, or it will be nothing.” In an additional twist, at once farcical and chilling, the video was set to music from Richard Wagner’s opera Lohengrin.
lvim was quickly sacked by Bolsonaro, who used the opportunity to re-affirm his “full and unrestricted support for the Jewish community, of which we’re friends and share many common values”. This affirmation is, unsurprisingly, of little solace for Seroussi, who recognises the threat of Bolsonaro and his policies on non-Jewish communities who are inherently tied to Casa do Povo’s responsibility as a Jewish institution. “We are a Jewish institution in the sense that we understand our Jewish legacy as being open to radical alterity, otherness,” he says. “If the Jews were the Others during the 20th century, a Jewish space has to be in that spirit.”
The theatre in the basement of the Casa do Povo.
This is evident in Casa do Povo’s institutional pgramming, which is as experimental and avantgarde as one might expect from a maverick organisation. Rather than a series of regular events or exhibitions arranged by one curatorial team, activities are generated by around 20 groups that are hosted within the building. Each of these receives a key and is allocated time to use the Casa, rather than occupying specific spaces within the building. Among the groups operating there today are Énois, a journalism school for young people living in the outskirts of São Paulo; a branch of Publication Studio, an international, decentralised, print-on-demand publishing house; Ateliê Vivo, a textile pattern library that promotes sustainable and equitable professional practices while paying tribute to Bom Retiro’s garment industry history; Boxe Autônomo, an antiracist, antifascist boxing club; and, of course, the Yiddish choir.
Part of the rationale behind this decentralising of curatorial decisions is to distribute power within the institution such that no group or individual speaks in place of others. In Brazil this is referred to as “lugar de fala”, which translates directly as “place of speech” but means “standpoint” or, more informally, “staying in your lane”. Seroussi uses the example of the trans performance group Mexa, one of the organisations in residence at the Casa do Povo, to illustrate the point. “All museums want to talk about women, migrants, and so on, but usually it’s a white male heterosexual curator who will talk about them, and that’s unbearable,” he explains. “It’s important to talk about trans issues, so we should hire trans people, but also some of the people that use the space should be trans groups, so they discuss themselves about what they do.” This is of particular importance in the context of the openly anti-LGBTQ+ Bolsonaro, presiding over what was already the most dangerous country in the world for trans people. In 2019, nearly 40 per cent of all murders of trans and gender-diverse people reported worldwide took place in Brazil.
Resident trans performance group Mexa holds a rehearsal.
Through this heterogeneous institutional identity, one might see the Casa do Povo as a true reflection of Brazil’s diversity. While the Bolsonaro administration seems keen to produce a restrictive vision of the ideal Brazilian subject – definitely masculine or feminine, ideally Christian, certainly not indigenous – the Casa do Povo provides a space to celebrate variety. This is evident on a neighbourhood level, in the re-launch of Nossa Voz, for example. Originally published in Portuguese and Hebrew, Nossa Voz was a source of Jewish news from both Brazil and the wider world. Today’s issues feature texts and interviews corresponding to works and events at the Casa do Povo, reflections on the institution’s history, as well as local news and listings. Despite no longer being published bilingually, the polyglot masthead reflects the diverse demographic of Bom Retiro today. It reads: Nossa Voz, 우리 목소리, שטימע אונדזער ,Nuestra Voz.
Applying a wider lens, however, the Casa do Povo has also become a place to discuss, reframe and expand notions of Brazilian identity and to nurture a sustained critique of national life under a far-right president. For example, Rejuvenate! was a 2018 group exhibition conceived by artist Renata Lucas to “take a stand” in the midst of the election campaign. When it opened, the show – which featured work by Mauro Restiffe, Carla Zaccagnini and many others – had no fixed closing date, reflecting what its manifesto described as “the passage of time towards an uncertain future”. More than 18 months on, Lucas’s work retains a presence at the Casa. Andar de cima is a flagpole that pierces through three levels of the building’s interior, disrupting the open floor plates and forcing activities to take place around it. A Brazilian flag at its peak looks “exhausted and crestfallen with its own weight”, as Fernanda Brenner wrote in Frieze. For Seroussi, the work serves as a reminder that in Brazil under Bolsonaro, “things aren’t normal”. He hopes, one day, to take it down
Words George Kafka
Photographs André Penteado
This article was originally published in Disegno #26. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.