Progress, velocity, machine and media: peripheral futurism and the journalist chronicle by João do Rio

Abstract

The exhibition "1908 – Um Brasil em Exposição" (Centro Cultural dos Correios, Rio de Janeiro, 2010) that ransoms the National Exhibition of 1908, is taken as the motivation to put in question the modernization, progress and technological imagination in Brazil such as its links to the media, components also motivating João do Rio’s production for the press, and his possible Futurism. There is no evidence that the journalist, traveling to Europe (1908-1909), has known Marinetti's Manifesto, published in Le Figaro in 1909, but has testified the atmosphere of modern times. By coincidence, he is touched by the myth of velocity and machine, subject of lot of journalistic chronicles, and after collected, in part, in books like Cinematographo e Vida vertiginosa, where one can see the thematic and discursive postures similar to the Futurist Manifesto. The aim of this essay is to test this hypothesis, deducing, through the mediation of the press, traits that precede the program in certain Brazilian modernism.