Yoni Goldstein

The objective of my fellowship is to produce a hybrid genre documentary disclosing the historical and architectural links between the world’s first fully integrated modernist city project, Brasília, and the techno-mystical, esoteric, and transcendental spaces that have emerged around it. This multi-platform media project proposes a lateral consideration of the built environment and collective ownership of its meanings in times of political and pandemic crisis. Radiating outwards from the space age city of Brasília, the project gathers imagery of life in a landscape of UFO cults, energy pyramids, cosmic monuments, and new age cities. It looks to Brazil’s capital not as a triumph or failure of its utopian desires but as a generative domain for imagining alternative cosmologies. Architecture in this context is interpreted as symbolically porous and unfixed, and presents an inclusive possibility for intimate systems of knowledge and resistance.