Fantasmagorias na metrópole: ensaios críticos a partir do circuito cultural praça da liberdade em Belo Horizonte

Abstract

We have reflected in these critical essays on certain consequences of the modernization process for the inherited city and everyday life in Belo Horizonte. Products and conditions of modernization, urbanization and metropolization settle on the extent of the reproduction of the capital. By noting the links between reproduction of social relations and urbanization, everyday and ideological representations of a city that became a metropolis, we have analyzed the changes and continuities observed in Praça da Liberdade (Liberty Square) for over a century. Defined as a bureaucratic center by the positivist republicanism in this supposedly modern city from the plan and construction of the "New Capital" of Minas Gerais from 1885, Praça da Liberdade has strengthened its monumental character, when interventions championed by companies and made possible by the State 're-functionalizing' the buildings in its surroundings , turning them into "cultural facilities" . The city and culture are deemed as given social needs, hence they have become "things" that are presented to us in the ghostly world of commodities. Therefore, we are questioning on the meanings and contradictions involved in monumentalization and fetishistic museumification of what remained of the city. And this by categorical conceptualization of social relations reproduced as reproduction of the capital in the modernization process. Depriving us of our own historicity, the human capacity to create and take ownership of works, we survive in a society devoid of transforming experiences, where the spectacular and contemplative appearance of "culture" and art eventually integrates the negative into the positive: the "free time" to enjoy them , instrumentalized as leisure , is the time to consume them , in the extension of the work, such as the social reproduction of the capital.