Description
Rio de Janeiro is home to various museums preserving the experiences of living in favelas and of the political struggles over safe and secure housing. O Museu da Maré, O Museo da Favela, O Museu do Horto, O Museu das Remoções, O Museu de Ontem: each memorialises histories and practices of struggles for housing in different ways. How do these museums preserve the skills, experiences, and practices of building houses in contested spaces? The first research question will take the notion of “the production of space” from the perspective of the collections presented in each museum. Different museums will prioritise different aspects of “production”, according to the experiences they seek to preserve; for example, O Museu das Romoções focuses on the political struggles against the removal of residents of Vila Autodromo or O Museu de Ontem focuses on the erasure of the history of the zone from the built environment. A second question engages the aesthetic dimension of the museums by considering the different modes of instituting memory – thus, where the Museu da Maré occupies a building in the favela, the Museo do Horto is a walking tour organised by residents: how do these different forms of representation afford different practices of producing space? A third question considers how, or whether, the specific practices of building the structures – organising the work, acquiring materials, access to tools and skills – are represented in the collections. The representation of the building of the favelas may be more or less explicit in different museums, inviting a specifically political question about what is revealed and what is set aside in these representations of space, and the difference it might make to acknowledge production relations in the production of space.
