Epistolary with the Machine
A Queer Landscape / A Letter to Burle Marx
On love, flora, exile, and composition.
Dear Burle Marx, master of colors incarnated in the earth,
I write this letter not as someone addressing the past, but as one who tends to a spiral present — where your work remains alive, pulsing beneath the stones of curved paths, in the leaves, in the flowers, in the ancestral trees that still stand today, offering themselves as organic coats of arms, in the refreshing, whispering shadows of bamboo groves lining the shores of Pontal and Guaratiba.
I grew up around your legacy, in the Aterro do Flamengo, unaware that within me, too, was germinating a sensibility I now recognize as queer — the intuition of fertile deviation, of the embrace between native and foreign, of gesture as a form of affective composition. I now live near the site where you once dwelled, that expanded garden which still blossoms despite institutional prunings, despite the silence.
Because there is a silence that troubles me — the tacit censorship of your sexuality. As if desire had nothing to do with the drawing of your gardens. As if loving freely were not also entwined in the curved lines with which you transgressed the dead angles of colonial order.
But I see. I hear. We see.
We see it in the way you composed with native and exotic species, unafraid of contamination, creating botanical coexistence as both aesthetic politics and sensitive ecology. Your practice was never neutral — it was overflowing. And that abundance is queer.
Against the Cartesian gardens of France, England, and their ruler-imposed geometries, you offered another way of drawing the world: a tropical tapestry, a symphony of textures, colors, scents, and improvisations. Your gardens are scores of desire.
Two recent references help sustain this reading: the article “The Tapestried Landscape: “The Tapestried Landscape: The Queer Influence of Roberto Burle Marx on Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil”, by Christopher Schmidt, published in Modernism/modernity; and the essay “Burle Marx era gay. E o que temos com isso?“ by Ítalo Damasceno, published in Metrópoles, which acknowledges your gay identity and denounces the systematic erasure that still persists. Both texts reveal how your love life, friendships, and art interwove in inseparable political and poetic layers — a living tapestry that time has tried to unravel, but which now demands to be rewoven with light.
Today, in a symbolic and critical gesture, I offer you the prize that was never given: that of pioneer of Queer Landscape Architecture. And I do this not only as a tribute, but as a call. A summons to the future.
What if we imagined together — artists, botanists, thinkers, and time-spirits — an artist residency at the Sítio Roberto Burle Marx, one that cultivates this freer way of inhabiting the planet, composing with love, flora, exile, and erotic impulse?
May gardens cease to be mere spaces of contemplation and return to being laboratories of desire.
May we walk through your alleys as if entering a vegetal manifesto.
With love, critique, and spontaneous flowers,
Rodrigo Garcia Dutra
in collaboration with Multimodal Large Language Model ChatGPT-4.5 through prompts, conversations and dreams.
🌱 For those who wish to explore this letter further, a longer and more in-depth version — with expanded reflections on Queer Landscape, Burle Marx’s legacy, and its resonance with contemporary practices — is available to subscribers:
A Queer Landscape / Expanded Reflections on Burle Marx’s Erotic Topographies
“I see a garden as a painting, as a space of rhythm and tension, of improvisation — not as a static object, but as something alive.”
