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Jonathas de Andrade
Born in 1982 in Maceió, Brazil / Lives in Recife, Brazil

Adriano Pedrosa (AP): What are the origins of Ressaca Tropical (Tropical Hangover, 2009)?

Jonathas de Andrade (JdA): The project began when I noticed that real-estate speculation in Recife, Brazil, was destroying incredible houses that my friends and I were beginning to spot in the city. They were houses of a somewhat local modernist repertoire, which we had been identifying and pointing out to one another. As they started to be destroyed, it seemed almost as though by perceiving and identifying them we had somehow set off a process of accelerated erosion. This brought us to think about two things. First, that everything that is not observed/focused on, and is forgotten, is what is in fact preserved (by way of forgetting), thereby becoming something available as a potential for the city. The second concerns the initial reaction to the destruction, which is an impulse to protect, stop, and interrupt through the official mechanism of having the houses designated as heritage sites.

AP: And what constitutes the work?

JdA: Ressaca Tropical is an installation of photographs linked with pages from a personal, romantic diary found in the trash in Recife. The photographs depict the same city scenario, at different times, and come from four collections, with personal and documentary perspectives. In isolation, the components of Ressaca Tropical are historical documents. Together, however, they compose a large urban fiction, a scenario that confuses construction with destruction, a city always with the same face, despite the passing of years. Here, nature implodes the architecture, which is mixed with the place of one’s desires. In this fiction, Recife stands as a generic Latin American city, marked by the postutopian character of a modernist project external to its own inherent logic—a city whose perceived failure is repositioned by the subsequent perspective that sees abandonment as settlement, and implosion as power, response, and germination.

AP: What is your reflection on the city’s ruins and transformation?

JdA: If the idea of cultural heritage is radicalized and the entire city becomes protected, it becomes totally crystallized and is no longer a living organism, but rather a dead scenario. Here lies an extremely interesting contradiction, where chaos and randomness are recognized as tools for preserving memory, in a logic where the true heritage sites are the forgotten ones. In this perspective, the ideas of preservation and heritage are seen as tools imported from a context extraneous to the city’s own logic—as is modernism itself. It was then possible to consider the destruction as a means by which this city can recognize the power of the freedom to reinvent itself, and to see nature, like sex and desire, as an inherent drive of the city, allowing for the involvement of this architecture, transforming it, possessing it, and establishing it according to its logic. I looked around and perceived a postwar sensation in this ruin, a post-utopia as an open possibility. It is not a sad, nostalgic ruin, but one where the ruin becomes a sign of renewal.