Acaiaca: The Building and the Fall
Published on LYSIS on
Image and attachment links point to their original locations.
It was in Belo Horizonte that I earned my degree in philosophy and began my career as a university teacher. Throughout the fourteen years I lived in the city, half of them as a student at UFMG, the Acaiaca Building was always there, imposing and enigmatic, in the heart of the capital of Minas Gerais.
At the turn of the century, while writing my first book, Vita (later published in 2007), I went up to the terrace of this thirty-storey building, some 120 metres high. I went because I wanted to experience the abyss as a space for deep reflection on life and to think about the place where so many people chose to end their stories. I was having no thoughts of dying myself.
I wanted to feel the air up there, to hear the silence that surrounds you between the city and the sky, and to let my body register the contrast between the solidity of the building and the void beyond the low wall. It was hardly a sightseeing trip, especially given how hard the building's history had made it to get up there. It was a meditative exercise, an attempt to come closer to the meaning of standing on that edge so near to absence and, paradoxically, to try to understand the meaning of existence better.
When I wrote about the Acaiaca in my História do Suicídio, I wanted to reveal the emotional atmosphere it carries as well as the building itself. In the chapter on these “places to die,” I describe my ascent to the top (there is now a rooftop venue on the twenty-sixth floor), the panoramic view of the Serra do Curral, and the experience of the abyss as an exercise I needed in order to make sense of life's arbitrariness and seek a justification in the face of it. It was a quiet effort to understand what the place meant to me and, above all, to reflect on why some had died there. Why there? Why that way? Why at that precise point between the ground and the sky?
My presence at the top that day expressed no desire to fall. I was reflecting on the wish so many people feel to disappear. I still wonder how many felt the same weight of emptiness I did, yet without the privilege of contemplative distance, without the protection I had at that moment of staging the leap as an object of thought. How many stood there intending to jump, with no thought of contemplation? How many hoped that jumping would be a gesture of authenticity, one last word against the world's silence?
Of course, the Acaiaca was never conceived as a site for suicide. Built at the end of the Second World War, with an air-raid shelter in the basement, lifts to the twenty-fifth floor, and mushroom-shaped columns, it stood out as a symbol of modernity and resilience. Its Art Deco architecture was intended to be humane and safe. Over the decades, however, it became a stage for voices that wanted to fall silent, in the belief that there in the city centre someone might bring their own story to an end.
On the façade of the Acaiaca, two enormous Indigenous masks, sculpted in reinforced concrete, look out over the city with enigmatic and imposing expressions. Inspired by the Acaiaca people, the figures were designed to convey strength and power. They represent the resilience and ancestry of a people who, according to legend, survived the flood that covered the earth. With their strong features and penetrating eyes, the masks seem to keep watch over the horizon, defying time and the city changing around them. The sculptures are silent witnesses to history and collective memory as well as decorative features. They challenge the hurried gaze of passers-by and invite reflection on past and present. When I began to think of the building as “my place at the limit,” I realized the symbolic intensity of that architectural body. It was a metaphor for my own failure to belong, for being in the middle of the city and feeling utterly isolated all the same. For me, and for others, the Acaiaca became a place where falling suggested a way out.
Today, living in Rio Grande do Sul after twelve years in the Northeast, I see that emptiness spreading to other places in Belo Horizonte: the Viaduto Santa Tereza, the bridge on the MG-030, and the railway tracks that cut through the city. Spaces that were once clearings of hope, viaducts that connected neighbourhoods and bridges that offered passage, have become sites of risk. They are stark symbols of the fragility of community ties and of the absence of attentive, compassionate listening to the pain of those who find themselves there.
These “new abysses” are everywhere, though they are neither conspicuous nor public. They reach into unseen places, into structures no one patrols and lives that pass unnoticed. Depression, silences, and suffering multiply in less obvious places, and the city's geoaesthetics splinters into spaces of existential hunger.
When I think of the Acaiaca and all it has meant in my life, I feel that closing doors, installing nets, and putting up barriers are no longer enough. Something much more fundamental is needed: opening up conversations, learning to listen attentively, and welcoming people in. Beyond preventing death, we need to learn again how to sustain life.