CHRISTOPH DRAEGER In collaboration with Gary Breslin “The Brazil Project.” Flash Art International 38:242 (May-June 2005): 94
ROEBLING HALL, CHRISTOPH DRAEGER In collaboration with Gary Breslin The Brazil Project. March 5 – April 9, 2005
Reviewed by Melissa Friedling
It is not surprising that an artist fascinated with the horror and disruption wrought by real-life disasters -- from the eruption of Krakatoa to the crash of TWA flight 800 -- would turn his attention to the fictional violence of the horror film. For The Brazil Project, Christoph Draeger, along with filmmaker, Gary Breslin, produced his own train wreck of a 30-minute film that pays homage to this terror-driven genre.
Set in and shot on location in São Paulo, Brazil, the narrative of Constructio Infernalis is uniquely situated amidst the country’s failed experiments in social engineering through modernist architecture. The plot follows two students, Caio and Lucia, who dare each other to visit the abandoned Paço des Artes, designed by Caio’s architecture professor and rumored to be haunted. With their barely veiled allusions to Oscar Neimeyer, the Brazilian architect renowned for designing sculpturally striking but unliveable concrete buildings, Draeger and Breslin’s narrative unfolds in one such horrifyingly obsolete construction.
True to genre, the young couple’s trespassing leads to their demise with enough Catholic-infused symbolism along the way, it literally spill off the screen and into the gallery (Draeger reconstructs the ritual sandbox used in the film by a group of glue-sniffing Exú cultist). And while homage is everywhere in the film (with a cameo by Brazilian horror icon, Zé do Caixao), a provocative critique of modernism’s naïve utopianism is more pretense than content.