Visual Essay: Between Brutocapitalism and the Scarcity of Life

Background: The recent Hollywood super-production “The Brutalist” (2024), scripted, produced and directed by American actor and filmmaker Brady Corbet, takes us on a journey through the story of László Tóth, a Hungarian architect and Holocaust survivor who immigrates to the United States in search of a new start for his life shattered by the Post-World War II Period (1939-1945). In this visual essay, however, the suffering of the fictional narrative constructed by Corbet will not be the focus of discussion. On the contrary, it will be the starting point [and the objective] so that it becomes possible to criticize and weave, in a simultaneous and multimodal way, the concepts of “brutalism” and “capitalism”, here named “brutocapitalism” (neological fusion between the two lexicons). As a consequence, we will approach the thinking of Achille Mbembe—in his book “Brutalisme” (2020)—and arrive at the space of the possibility of presenting a set of sensibilities highlighted and put into evidence by the authors of this essay. As an experiential result, it was possible to perceive the similarities between the opacity and barbarity experienced by the majority of human bodies when the inevitable encounter between brutalism (in its many senses, including architectural and artistic) and capital (especially that linked to its entrenched “-ism”, as a suffocating suffix)—specifically, in the metropolitan (geographical) region of Recife, in Pernambuco. The main techniques used in this process were painting on canvas, using photography per se, manipulating images and superimposing images, whether photographic or not; authorial or not.