7. Juli 2026, von Luke Becker

Foto: UHH/Burkhardt

Dienstag, 07. Juli 2026, 14 Uhr ESA O 221, Edmund Siemers-Allee 1, Flügelbau Ost, 20146 Hamburg

Am Dienstag, den 07. Juli 2026, um 14 Uhr c.t. wird Professor Dr. Kelly E. Hayes von der Indiana University, USA, einen Gastvortrag in ESA O 221, Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1, Flügelbau Ost, 20146 Hamburg, halten. Titel und Thema: "Imagined Utopias: Brasília and the Valley of the Dawn“. Es wird um Anmeldung gebeten (stefanie.burkhardt"AT"uni-hamburg.de). Alle sind herzlich eingeladen. 

Since its inauguration in 1960, Brasília has become famous for its utopian aspirations and iconic modernist architecture, intended to both symbolize and galvanize the country's progressive future. Even as the city was materializing on the Brazilian high plains, another  utopian vision was remaking the landscape nearby — the Valley of the Dawn, one of the largest and most colorful alternative religions in the federal district. In this lecture, I read Brasília alongside the Valley of the Dawn as parallel utopian visions encoding modernity's promise of equality, progress, and a break from the past and its problematic legacies. The central irony is that Brasília reproduced the very inequities it sought to erase, while the Valley — widely dismissed as a fringe cult — actually succeeded in realizing the egalitarian ideals Brasília promised. Drawing on Winnicott's notion of the transitional object, I ask why Brasília is celebrated as a work of genius while the Valley is dismissed as delusion — and suggest the answer lies not in the quality of the vision but in the social power to define which imagined worlds count as legitimate.

Kelly E. Hayes is Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University‐Indianapolis. She earned a Ph.D. in the History of Religions at the University of Chicago and has been conducting field research on religion in Brazil since 1997.

Und hier geht’s zum Plakat.