Um jardim para além do paraíso: Geografia Cultural e Arqueologia da Paisagem no Passeio Público do Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

The Public Walk in Rio de Janeiro was more than a garden for social entertainment, it was a political and cultural strategy to produce space. Understood as a historical archaeological artifact and as a hybrid spatial form between nature and culture, the architecture and landscaping of this garden contain, in addition to its first and practical functions, second functions with a strong symbolic charge. This symbolism present in its different landscape styles gave it its own spatial language as a factor of social communication and, as such, capable of being analyzed by iconology and semiology as possible paths for its interpretation. This language, which operated as a particular geographical grammar, participated in regimes of images and visibilities where the game of visual operations allowed the Passeio Público to participate intensely in the elaboration and constitution of the idea of Rio's landscape. In this sense, considering Passeio as a landscape maker and himself, simultaneously, a landscape and a place, the concept of landscape served as a conceptual basis that permeated the entire research. Cultural Geography and Landscape Archeology were chosen to house the object due to its concerns with the role and the importance of culture in the production, organization, and perception of landscape. It is intended, in this dissertation, to interpret and understand the symbolic construction of the different landscape styles of these gardens, through the interpretative reading of its spatial order. Thus, it can be seen, in the analysis of its spatial signs, that the Passeio Público garden was more than a simple reflection of socio-cultural processes, but actively participated as one of its constitutive factors, acting with a vector of symbolic messages that interfered in construction of the idea of Rio’s landscape and national identity.