Hemingway 1 and Hemingway 2 are part of Carmo Pinheiro de Melo’s series Away with Brutus (2020), a manifesto against Brutalism, that explores the concepts of the materiality of emptiness and the negative space as a potential field of creation.

The artist explores a telescopic view of the concrete remains of an old brutalist library, revealing its interiority – a ludic approach if we take into consideration that Brutalism is already characterized by the use of exposed concrete. Though seemingly solid on the outside, its interior resembles a mass in mutation or in a process of dissolution, an image that evokes the rejection this architectonic style suffered. In fact, even though brutalist public buildings and housing complexes were designed to better serve the needs of the working class, this movement was gradually scorned. Their mass translates a feeling of permanence that contrasts with the way in which these big linear blocks of repetitive patterns and stocked floors were demolished or abandoned.

Even though they seem to be hard to destroy or alter, Carmo Pinheiro de Melo changes the traces of these spaces, through the digital medium, by transforming its materiality. Deconstructing the notions of solidity associated with concrete, as well as the generalized conception that it is a poor and oppressive material, the artist questions its essence by giving it an alternative look – vibrant, disarmed and harmonious. In this sense, her work gives body to the emptiness, that is, to a space that is no longer present and an object that no longer exists, thus valuing it. It is then through the negative space that Carmo Pinheiro de Melo subverts the characteristics of this material, destabilizing our understanding of it.