By JOSE TAVARES LYRE CORRE*
the concession of a posthumous honorary diploma to a former student of the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism at USP
1.
It was with great honor that I received a request from the undergraduate committee of the School of Architecture, Urbanism and Design of the University of São Paulo to analyze and instruct the process of awarding an honorary diploma in posthumous honor to former FAU student Antonio Benetazzo, in line with the “Diplomacy of Resistance” project. Initiatives to redress human rights violations, even if symbolic in nature, have historically and everywhere proven to be fundamental to the struggles for memory, truth and justice.
Launched in 2023, the University of São Paulo's initiative is absolutely commendable. As is well known, the central role of Brazilian universities – and the USP community in particular – in resisting the arbitrary regime installed in the country in 1964 made it a preferred target for repressive actions of all kinds.
Intimidation and violation of the rights of teachers and students, political-ideological surveillance in classrooms and departments, compulsory retirements and unfounded dismissals, arbitrary impediments to hiring, re-hiring and enrollment, illegal arrests, torture, forced exile, summary executions and the concealment of corpses have severely affected the USP community, sometimes regrettably counting on the complicity of former leaders.
According to the final report of the National Truth Commission, more than 10% of those killed and disappeared in the country during the dictatorship were in some way linked to USP. Antônio Benetazzo is one of them. Cultivating his memory, studying and making his short life story, his work, his artistic work, his ideas and struggles known is not only a way of honoring the individual, but also a way of amplifying in society the knowledge of one of the darkest moments in the country's life and the importance of those who gave their lives in the fight against tyranny.
In fact, following the work of the National Truth Commission, the USP Truth Commission itself, established in 2013, included among the 14 conclusive recommendations of its final report the “graduation of students who died or disappeared due to the violation of their human rights by the civil-military dictatorship”.[I]
Likewise, the Congregation of FAU-USP, in its 651a. Ordinary Session, on August 31, 2022, approved the final report of the Working Group “Reparation Policies”, composed of several professors and undergraduate and graduate students from FAU, installed on September 30, 2021 in response to an Open Letter to the Congregation sent the day after the fateful September 7, 21 by the Guild of the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism and Design and the Caetés Collective of the faculty, demanding “a formal statement in redress for the arbitrary acts committed during the civil-military dictatorship and in honor of its victims and those who stood up for democracy in the country”.[ii] Among the various suggestions from the GT approved by the Congregation was expressly included “the symbolic title as architect and urban planner of the former student Antonio Benetazzo, who died on October 30, 1972.”[iii]
2.
Antonio Benetazzo was born in Verona, Italy, on 1o. November 1941. His family was lower middle class and emigrated to Brazil in 1950 amid the Italian post-war economic crisis. Entering the workforce was not easy, and his father's small business ventures forced the family to move around the interior of the state of São Paulo constantly. They lived in Guarulhos, São Vicente, Caraguatatuba and Mogi das Cruzes, and Benê studied in public schools his entire life, alternating between studying and working, including as a laborer, and from his adolescence he also became involved with the visual arts and theater.
These were years of great social mobilization in the country, and students and artists tended to get closer to the workers' and peasants' movements. While still in high school, he became involved in the student movement and in the Popular Cultural Centers of the National Union of Students. In 1962, he joined the Communist Party of Brazil, the PCB. Shortly after, in 1964, he enrolled in the Architecture and Urban Planning course at FAU-USP, when he transferred from Mogi das Cruzes to São Paulo.
In 1966, he also enrolled – as was permitted at the time – in the Philosophy course at the Faculty of Philosophy, Sciences and Letters on Rua Maria Antônia. In the same year, he became president of the Student Union of the FFCL-USP and got involved in organizing the Setembrada, a large student demonstration throughout the country that lasted a few days in September of that year. Participating intensely in the fight against the dictatorship, his political activity increasingly permeated his artistic production, as can be seen in works such as Down with the dictatorship, by 1966, and And dead he remained, in homage to Che Guevara, October 1967.
From 1968 is the woodcut The people are against the military dictatorship. For a free Brazil, made in partnership with artist and FAU student Cláudio Tozzi, as a poster for the 30tho. UNE Congress in Ibiúna, in whose organization the student took part.
Drawing closer to the most radical movements of resistance to the dictatorship, Antonio Benetazzo had been a member of the University Dissidence of São Paulo since 1966. It was perhaps at this time that he began to doubt the possibility of a more institutional, peaceful opposition to the military, such as that practiced by his party, the PCB, or by the Brazilian Democratic Movement, the MDB, the only legal opposition party, founded at the beginning of that year.
Increasingly, the student, like so many others of the period, seemed to be betting on political insurgency as a path to revolutionary transformation in the country, taking the Cuban Revolution as an example a few years earlier. In 1967, together with a whole wing of PCB militants, including a dozen architects and architecture students from FAU, he broke with the party to join Carlos Marighella's National Liberation Action, the ALN.
By becoming involved in the direct confrontation with the dictatorship, he began to live under the watchful eye of the dictatorship's intelligence services and in 1969 he definitively went underground, giving up contact with his family, friends, his home, his studies at USP, his work as a teacher, his artistic career, and his own identity.
In mid-1969, the activist embarked on a long trip abroad. Officially, he went to Italy, his country of origin, with the aim of deepening his study of European art. “Apparently, after traveling for several months, moving between different countries to mislead the dictatorship’s information agencies, he finally reached Cuba in the second half of 1970, remaining there for more than a year until returning to Brazil with the aim of continuing his political resistance activities against the authoritarian State.”[iv]
It was during his guerrilla training in Cuba that, disagreeing with his ALN comrades' assessment that the worsening carnage against the political insurgency groups in Brazil was not favorable to the continuation of the armed struggle, Antonio Benetazzo joined the dissident wing of the Popular Liberation Movement, MOLIPO. Under these conditions, he returned to Brazil in the second half of 1971 and settled clandestinely in São Paulo with the aim of returning to armed resistance in the countryside, convinced of the possibility of overthrowing the dictatorship that had been established during that period.
It was with this aim that MOLIPO invested in a communication strategy with the people and Antonio Benetazzo began working as the newspaper's editor. Popular Press, where he anonymously published several articles and drawings analyzing the current situation and calling for insurrection. The documentation collected by the National Truth Commission shows that MOLIPO's actions were closely monitored by the security forces. And in fact, one year after his return, in October – or September – 1972, Antonio Benetazzo was arrested, tortured and executed by DOI-Codi agents in São Paulo.
3.
In everyone's memory, Antonio Benetazzo, besides being a fierce and generous activist, was also an attentive reader of poetry and philosophy. His classes at the FFCL Student Union and at the University Preparatory Course, where he worked alongside his classmate and fellow painter Luiz Paulo Baravelli, are famous, preparing students who intended to apply for the FAU entrance exam. Many of those who entered the school after 1964 have fond memories of him.
For a brief period he also taught History of Art and Sociology of Art at the former Institute of Art and Decoration, Iadê, alongside Ítalo Bianchi, Odiléia Toscano, Sérgio Ferro, Ruy and Ricardo Ohtake, Carlos Fajardo, Jean-Claude Bernadet, Haron Cohen, Carlos Heck and others. Ferro, by the way, noted: “I remember a seminar in which he presented a then innovative and recent text, the first chapter of The Order of Things, by Michel Foucault, a book that brings together his two fields of study, philosophy and art.
At the time, there was not yet the enormous mass of comments that today almost prevent a balanced reading of this text. Antonio Benetazzo gave a luminous presentation without pious adherence, which was already rare at the time.”[v] For Alípio Freire, he was “the most brilliant figure of our generation”.[vi]
In addition to the extensive collection of memoirs about himself, Antonio Benetazzo left behind more than 200 works of art, most of which were produced during the early years of the dictatorship, when his study, teaching and activism intensified. A voracious self-taught artist, his works were imbued with his studies of Michelangelo, Düher, Rubens, Goya, Kitagawa Utamaro, Utagawa Hiroshige, Toulouse-Lautrec, Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Modigliani, Saul Steinberg and Julius Bissier.
He worked with numerous techniques, materials and supports, with drawing, painting, engraving, photography, collage, poster, caricature, silkscreen, pastel chalk, graphite, gouache, India ink, ecoline, at a certain point approaching Latin American pop, as Frederico Morais would say, more aggressive and political than the American one: which “contests, but which observes”.[vii]
Spread across about twenty homes belonging to friends and family of Antonio Benetazzo, to whom the student donated his artistic production before going underground, his work is still only accessible to the public in limited quantities. Some posthumous exhibitions have begun to reflect this effort to bring together his work as an artist and to recognize the artist-activist.
The first posthumous exhibition took place in 1981, at the delivery of the III Vladimir Herzog Journalism Award for Amnesty and Human Rights, established a few years after Herzog's murder inside the DOI-CODI. In 1990, journalist Alípio Freire organized the second exhibition, Points, Lines and Planes – Antonio Benetazzo and his Comrades, bringing together 30 of his works alongside a set of works produced by seven other militant artists in São Paulo prisons during the dictatorship.
In 2016, the Municipal Secretariat for Human Rights and Citizenship and the Secretariat for Culture of São Paulo came together to organize the exhibition Antonio Benetazzo, permanence of the sensitive, held at the São Paulo Cultural Center, curated by Reinaldo Cardenuto.[viii]
During his lifetime, he exhibited his work only once, in 1968, in the second edition of the exhibition at the USP Museum of Contemporary Art, conceived and directed by its director, Prof. Walter Zanini. Today, at MAC USP, we are working to join this reparation and incorporate some of his works into the Museum's collection.
Not only as a way of preserving his memory and special sensitivity to the country's political moment, but for the quality of his production which, oscillating between the historical and the timeless in art, the poetic and the artistic guerrilla, still manifests today, with all exuberance, the best of the point of view, the political unrest and the revolutionary feelings of his generation.
Catalogue of the second Young Contemporary Art exhibition at MAC USP, São Paulo, 1968 – One of the three works by Benetazzo exhibited at the 2nd JAC under the title “And when there is no inspiration?”
4.
Assassinated at a very young age, when he was just emerging in the arts, teaching and politics, it was thanks to the efforts of his friends that his life was not completely erased. It is impossible to say in which field he would come to stand out, given his many qualities and vocations, and to distinguish this University along his path. Would he be a great artist, philosopher or architect today? A professor of history and theory of art and architecture?
Would he have established himself as a poet or engaged in the fight for Amnesty, Direct Elections Now, human rights, social rights, and socialism? Or would he have established himself as a politician who lived up to the most just demands of the people, something increasingly rare these days? Or all of these things together, as the radical humanist that he undoubtedly was, dedicating his life entirely to art, education, utopia, and the courageous fight against tyranny?
There are many versions of the brutality of his murder. According to the official version, Antonio had committed suicide by throwing himself under a truck, after telling agents where he was meeting with his comrades. The Periodic Information Report no. 10/1972 of the II Army, dated November 6, 1972, confirms his arrest on the 27th of the previous month. Benetazzo's name is also listed in Information no. 4.057/16/1975 /ASP/SNI, dated September 11, 1975. This document states that he died in the state of São Paulo, on October 30, 1972. Antonio was buried as an indigent in the Perus ditch.”[ix]
According to the final report of the CNV, Antonio Benetazzo “was arrested at the end of October 1972 and taken to DOI-CODI/SP, where he was tortured to death.” In Bananas in the wind, Jefferson Del Rios, claims he was murdered under torture at DOI-Codi.[X] Marcio Colaferro, a former Iadê teacher, says that he was an exceptional teacher and that “I saw him being murdered in front of Iadê by the dictatorship. The police drove over him in their car, shot him… and everyone saw him!”).[xi]
In an article for the Folha de S. Paul, after the publication of the CNV report, journalist Monica Bergamo, known for the credibility of her sources, details the brutal episode of his murder: “The soldiers took Antonio Benetazzo to a farm in Parelheiros and struck him on the head. Then, they ran over his skull with the wheel of a Beetle. On the way to Brás, where they intended to leave his body, he woke up. They decided to go back. This time they decided to exterminate him with stones. With the certainty of death, they went back to Brás, where the body was thrown in front of a moving truck, to simulate suicide. It was October 30, 1972.”[xii]
He was stoned to death at the 31 de Março site in Parelheiros and was buried as an indigent in the clandestine grave of the Perus Cemetery. His body was only found in 1990, when the grave was opened, next to the bodies of Alexandre Vanucchi Leme and 12 other militants killed by the repression.[xiii]
The awarding of a posthumous honorary degree to the former student of this Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism Antonio Benetazzo, who dedicated his life to art, poetry, philosophy, teaching, social justice, and the uncompromising fight for freedom and against dictatorship, is a tribute that is absolutely consistent with the defense of democracy, human rights, and fundamental university values such as the plurality of ideas, the exercise of freedom of thought, expression, and association, critical activity, and social diversity.
Reaffirming the commitments made by the Reparation Working Group created by the Congregation of this house, I could not fail to welcome this initiative as a gesture of appreciation of social memory understood as an important locus for understanding collective struggles and achievements against the countless forms of oppression and silencing. The granting of this title by the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism and the University of São Paulo is a breath of hope for a truly democratic society. Long live Benetazzo! Benetazzo Vive!
*Joseph Tavares He is a full professor at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism at USP and director of MAC-USP.
Notes
[I] https://sites.usp.br/comissaodaverdade/relatorio-final/
[ii] https://forms.gle/o72hAq6DQ9TWxjTX9
[iii] Minutes of the 651st ORDINARY SESSION of the Congregation of the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism and Design of the University of São Paulo, held on 31.08.2022/69/77, pp. XNUMX-XNUMX.
[iv] Reinaldo Cardenuto. Antonio Benetazzo, permanences of the sensitive. In Cardenuto, R. (org.) Antonio Benetazzo: permanences of the sensitive. Sao Paulo: City of Sao Paulo, 2016, p. 24
[v] Sergio Ferro. Libertarian art and the silences of history. In Cardenuto, R. (org.) op. cit., p. 31.
[vi] https://youtu.be/6L-VKnlVSUQ
[vii] Frederico Morais. American Art: the middle, the road, on the road. GAM Magazine, n. 15, 1968, p. 19, apud REIS, P. Stories, marks and traces. In Cardenuto, R. (org.) op. cit., p. 37
[viii] Cardenuto, R. (org.) Op. cit.
[ix] Ditto, p. 530.
[X] Jefferson Del Rios. Bananas in the wind. Sao Paulo: Senac, 2006.
[xi] Marcio Colaferro, In Sephan, AP The creation of Iadê – Institute of Art and Decoration 1959. DATJournal, v.5, n.2, 2020.
[xii] Monica Bergamo, The indigent artist, Folha de S. Paul, July 19 2015.
[xiii] Brazil. National Truth Commission. Report/National Truth Commission. Flight. 1. Brasilia: CNV, 2014, p. 515.
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