Brazilian cultural movement founders may bring legal action to have name removed from luxury real estate venture
The creators have christened it Tropicália – a luxury beachside condominium in north-eastern Brazil boasting outdoor swimming pools, a private cinema and even a replica castle for youngsters.
But the naming of the palm-flanked condo – intended as a tribute to the avant-garde movement that revolutionised Brazilian culture in the 1960s and influenced global musicians such as Kurt Cobain and Beck – has triggered a war of words between the construction firm and the pioneers of the genre.
The artists describe the condo as an affront to their legacy and are demanding the name is changed.
"We do not want … our work linked to a mega-real estate venture," said the composer Caetano Veloso, one of the movement's founders, in an interview this week. "If the construction company really wants to pay homage to the movement, it should start by respecting the wishes of its creators."
Odebrecht Realizações Imobiliárias, the real-estate branch of Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht, describes its 32,000-sq-metre project in the north-eastern city of Salvador as "a homage to the cultural movement that … made Brazilian musical history… breaking paradigms … dictating fashion and forever influencing our way of seeing and making art.
"Just like the cultural movement that inspired it, our Tropicália is an invitation to life as it should be: painted with the colours of happiness, transformational … filled with love for the place we live," boasts a glossy brochure promoting three- and four-bedroom seafront apartments priced at over R$800,000 (£300,000). The condominium's prospectus makes frequent allusions to the tropicália movement. One page carries the headline, "Where the Divine meets the Marvellous" – a reference to the tropicália anthem Divino, Maravilhoso, recorded in 1969 by the Brazilian singer Gal Costa and composed by Veloso and Gilberto Gil, Brazil's former culture minister.
Another section, promoting a glitzy party salon, carries the headline: "If this place was a song the chorus would be 'live, live, live'."
But the project, part of a major nationwide real-estate boom, has outraged the musicians and poets behind the tropicália movement.
In a letter to the construction company, Tom Zé, another of Tropicália's founding members, claimed the gated community "went against the whole philosophy of this movement, whose members would never agree to link their work to a real-estate venture of this size".
"I cannot accept the … unauthorised commercial use of the name Tropicália, the only objective of which is to make you profit," he added.
Gilberto Gil has also vowed to back legal action to prevent the name being used.
In an email to the Guardian, Odebrecht said it had no plans to alter the condo's name and denied it was seeking to profit from the tropicália brand. "The company has undertaken studies showing that location, design, cost and leisure options are the key criteria for buying a property. In this sense, the name of a condominium is not a relevant factor for buying real estate and, therefore, one cannot say that the company will increase sales by using the term 'tropicália'," it argued.
Odebrecht said it had located 76 registered businesses already using the Tropicália brand in São Paulo and 40 in Rio de Janeiro. It also denied making direct references to specific songs, despite reports that it planned to name buildings after well-known tropicália tracks.
"Odebrecht Realizações Imobiliárias has used words that recall the Tropicália period … but without using the [names of] songs or making direct references to the participants of the movement."