The Spiritus Loci in the Mouraria: Nomad museology experience
Pedro Pereira Leite - MED / pedropereiraleite@hotmail.com
Abstract
This article deals with the problematic of Space Poetics in the context of the UNESCO Declaration on Museums, Collections and their Cultural Diversity and Social Function (2015), analyzing their opportunities for the creation of Social Innovation in urban museology processes in urban space. We used the Bairro da Mouraria, in Lisbon, as Case Study.
This is an experimental ation of the MED with the PhD program on Museolgy of the Lusófona University of Lisbon, applied to the urban space, which seeks to reflect on how the museum intervention can be concretized as citizenship action in the city. Based on the recognition of the need to test mechanisms of social museology intervention in urban spaces of high concentration and dynamics, the proposal seeks to understand how conditions can be created to approach the community to involve it in participatory museological processes.
The work carried out used the experience of the trip as recognition of relevance for the construction of patrimonial processes. The project is in process and its results are provisional. Intervention with the community is a slow process that requires the creation of bonds of trust and permanence over a longer or shorter time, allowing not only the creation of links of implication, but also through dialogue to emerge a participatory inventory process of materials relevant to the creation of innovative museum processes.
Key words
Social museology, mouraria, patrimonial processes, space poetics, nomadic museology
The Poetics of Space and the “Spiritus Loci”
The poetic dimension of space is a tool we have been using in the context of our work on heritage, as a process for the co-creation of participatory processes, for the recognition of the “spirit of the place”. It is a component of the “Cultural Landscape” that has been little valued by the academic works, more focused on the issues of monumentality of the heritage and for the objects of power inscribed in the space, that we strive to give methodological relevance in action research.
The Spirit of the Place on the Preservation of the Spiritus Loci is a Declaration of ICOMOS, adopted at the 16th General Assembly held in Quebec, Canada, in October 2008. The Declaration establishes the principles and recommendations for the preservation of the Spiritus Loci “through heritage, considering that this is an innovative and efficient way to ensure sustainable and social development in the world. It seeks the essence of life, social and spiritual of a community in its relationship with the place. The Spirit of the place includes the values of memory, beliefs, knowledge and processes of connection to places, and local communities, called as guardians of these values.
The question of the unity of the patrimonial object is an old debate. In 1972, the UNESCO Convention on the Protection of the Cultural and Natural Heritage was approved, defining objects that deserve the title “cultural heritage” (monuments, sites and sites) and ” natural patrimony”. (geo-monuments, natural parks and geo-sites). Like all processes of disjunction, when integrating some objects and their forms, others are excluded. As has been noted, this convention, while relevant in its time, has forgotten important ways in which the patrimonial processes of the southern communities were affirmed in society and the ways in which they value their relations with nature. It is known for example that everything that constituted popular manifestations, knowledge and techniques of the communities, rhythms and music, gastronomy and flavors, ways of working the lands, ways of feeling the other, processes of relation with the sea, or the diversity were excluded from the Convention.
We can therefore say that as a result of the critics about the processes of exclusion of diverse heritage objects and as an evolution of the complexity of the Heritage concept, UNESCO will approve already at the beginning of the new millennium a set of three more conventions that complete the current architecture of the normative of patrimonial protection. These include the Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage in 2002 of the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, and in 2005 the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions. Although each of the Conventions has its own rules, each of the Conventions incorporates the previously agreed rules. Avoiding its repetition it is nonetheless including in the interpretation of the new instrument, although sometimes the processes that it gives origin, may not be the same
Work on heritage should therefore take this complex architecture into account and apply a multidisciplinary and diversified approach to gather information to better understand, manage and conserve the contexts in which different heritage sites are located.
This complexity is in turn densified in different regional contexts, where other norms and traditions of safeguard stand. For example in Europe, you have to take into account the Council of Europe conventions or recommendations on how to manage the Heritage and the relation to Nature. But in some cases, such as Portugal, in addition to belonging to this space, we must also take into account the deliberations of the Organization of Ibero-American States and the CPLP (although this organization has done very little work outside the field of the common language.
This leads to a diversity of practice or conceptual approaches, which built on the interpretation of material and the immaterial, gives rise to lively and open debates, not always concordant in terms of safeguarding practices and results. For example in South America, the immaterial is a way of affirming the specificities of subaltern communities, in Portugal the immaterial tends to assume an affirmation of its baroque dimension, serving as a basis for the reinvention of traditionality. This reinvention of traditionalism, built on a false awareness of the distinction between material and immaterial, on the basis of which the tourist gentrification process has been operating in the patrimonial field, is creating a pressure for the feitichización of the patrimony
The tool of space poetics emerges in the reading of heritage as a narrative about space. It allows intuitive capture of transformation processes. The poetics presents a proposal of exegetical experience (of exegesis or transcendence) that liberates meanings contained in the forms. The use and experience of space is done by verbalization and ritualization. Verbalization is the process as we communicate through it, whether by intentional or unintentional movement. Ritualizations are all pendular movements, fair, or parties that take place in these spaces. They are movements of attraction and repulsion of a greater or lesser number of people.
At the same time space has an inclusive dimension. A theoretical dimension that includes what is immanent. This is what is not immediately visible is there and can be observed. A meaning that is only revealed by the decoding exercise, an experience of group preferences. That is why it is an immanent dimension through which the whole is sought in the essence of things. This dimension can be catalyzed through narratives contextualized in space and time. They are processes that are fixed. It is through them that we capture phenomena. It is this contextual discourse that successively recreates the social experience, constituting the development narratives themselves, tested in the circumstances of each space and each time.
Poetics as a communicative act allows us to produce plural meanings, through which innovative readings can be formed. The poetic dimension is translated by an experience of the sensitive: A journey of the senses through space in search of procedural moments. Poetics as an urban experience is an experience of intersubjectivity where the various subjects move in time and space around socially significant objects of common heritage, to jointly reconstruct the elements that are common to them, creating new meanings and new processes .
The question of poetics is also relevant in order to overcome the issues of authenticity and traditionality, as heritage theories have been accentuating. Faced with the emergence of this processualist phenomenology, patrimonial objects reveal the evidence of its metonymic condition. Outside the hegemonic narratives, the patrimonial object denies itself. Poetics allows the emergence of innovation in inclusive environments of diversity and opens the way for the dialogue involved in the construction of patrimonial action.
The New Recommendation of UNESCO
The new UNESCO Recommendation on the Protection and Promotion of Museums and Collections, their Diversity and their Role in Society, adopted at the 38th General Conference of Unesco in November 2015, confirms the theoretical work that has been field of Social Museology in the last thirty years. The approval of this recommendation counted on the strong impulse of the Brazilian Institute of Museums, and above all the recognition of the strong innovation that the processes inspired in the matrix of social museology showed in Brazil and in Latin America.
This is the first UNESCO guiding document for the area of museums over the last fifty years. It updates theoretical and procedural and legitimate notions, the introduction, in the field of new approaches and concepts, such as the “social function of museums”. It is true that for at least 40 years, social museology activists have been affirming the need to understand the social function of museums as a structuring vector of their activity in the community. But the UNESCO Recommendation form, by its universal reference value, thus becomes an instrument for all museum professionals.
Like all international documents, this Recommendation mirrors the delicate commitments of the museum community. Between a more conservative view, more focused on the museological object, and a vision of social intervention, with concerns of involvement with the community and with the progress of the territories. After a long process, with the participation of more than 160 specialists and at least 70 Member States, the “Recommendation, with all its contradictions, is today a useful and innovative instrument for the field of museology.
The Recommendation was possible to be approved by the guided work of several professionals in the field of museums working in Latin American countries. Brazil, through IBRAM, played an important role in this context, but the success of the process that resulted in the Recommendation is due in particular to the concert of the Ibero-American countries.
This Recommendation gives relevance to themes that have been on the agenda of the International Movement for New Museology for more than thirty years, such as the diversity and social function of museums. For this reason, although it is possible at times to identify in the Recommendation an undisguised desire to produce norms and rules, there is also space there to guarantee, extend and subsidize new and old reflections and practices of Social Museology or Sociomuseology
Regardless of a more detailed analysis of the innovation of the new UNESCO Recommendation, which we will do elsewhere, it is worth looking now at what it means in the field of Museological Theory. In general we can say that this recommendation consecrates the emergence of a scientific discipline. We have listed above the structural documents of Social Museology, in particular those that were on the table at the Meeting of Québec in 1984.
An inheritance that arises from the relation of museums to the community and to their educational function, established in Santigo Chile in 1972 (not forgetting the UNESCO Regional Seminar, held in Rio de Janeiro in 1958, where issues of the educational function museums and museum objects), and the Oaxtepec Declaration, also in 1984, where the relationship between heritage, territory and community is established, until we reach the Rio Declaration in 2013, on “Museology of Affection” .
It is worth highlighting the legacies of these statements to understand the affiliation of museological theory in a process that is based on institutions that work in the community to produce social changes. Changes that are created from the educational practices of transformation of the individual. It is from the education of the individual, from his possibility of transformation, as Paulo Freire underlined in his pedagogy of Liberation, that social changes can be generated.
An education that is thought as a possibility of transformation, of the individual and through him of the social whole, is a process that results from the possibility of encounter. A meeting that takes place in institutions, in formal and non-formal and even informal processes. The museum as an educational institution assumes itself as a coproductive institution of knowledge built in processes with the community. A museum designed as a space for action and communication. Museum as places of encounters and exchanges. Connecting people, knowledge, to build bridges and create awareness.
Museology and Renewal of Museological Theory
A UNESCO Recommendation is a normative instrument. It is, in comparison with the Convention, a lower instrument in terms of binding force. The Convention obliges the signatory States, which shall stipulate their provisions into national law. The Recommendation links public policies and professionals with practices and action objectives.
The field of museology (here regarded as the theoretical field of studies on collective memory, Heritage Studies and Studies on the Museums of memory) and their practices, of safeguarding and communicating through processes that take shape in society, in different institutions of a more or less formal form (museums, archives, libraries) or non-formal (schools, cultural centers, miscellaneous equipment) or even informal (everywhere) establishes tense relations with modernity in times of epistemic transition ).
Museological thinking works on inheritances, on normative instruments, in which the production of UNESCO Conventions, Recommendations and Declarations are paradigmatic instruments, based on epistemological legacies. These relations contain the historicity of museological thought. To a certain extent they are constituted as memory inheritance systems and are configured as memory management systems.
The documentary architecture of UNESCO shows and highlights what we can consider as “Social memory management systems”. These systems of collective memory administration constitute processes of representation of the real. Processes that give rise to preservation strategies, which are reflected in actions of production of this collective memory and its reproduction processes. Production of memory and production of educational actions (or the processes of reproduction of this memory) delimit the field of museological action. A field that works the relationship between human beings and their socially qualified objects (cultural and natural assets) in a given context (a scenario). A relationship in which the natural becomes cultural by the look and action of protection, safeguard, conservation and by the action of promotion, valorization
This relation in the epistemological field develops in the process of attribution of relevance (process of production of collective memory) that attributes to it or not attribute of Heritage (Heritage), from which constitutes a qualification (patrimonial attribute), and that originates an action (the musealization process, which safeguards and communicates it).
The Museological Theory and the operative chain of museology
The epistemological hierarchy (relevance-recognition-action) constituted from memory- + heritage + museological process is based on the operative chain of museology. A chain that begins in the cognitive process of attribution of relevance (the museum fact) from which constitutes the museological phenomenon worked by the museological process.
It is on these museological phenomena that the museological processes are developed, the set of actions that are exerted by the human beings in the objects that are relevant to them, in a certain context. What the Recommendation brings back to us is the significance of social relevance of the attributes of museology. In line with what the new museology was advocating, the choice of safeguarding and communicating heritage and museological objects also depends on its social relevance. Of the attributes they have for the community.
This is an example of innovation in the Recommendation on the Social Function of museums and their collections. In line with what the new museology has already identified, the attribution of relevance to the actions of protection (safeguard) and its communication, constitute as public policies and must take into account diversity of knowledge. This recommendation, without removing attributes to museology professionals, now adds that the attribution of heritage relevance, or rather “the constitution of the memory agenda” can no longer be exclusively made by the elites, and that in this process one must try to incorporate the diversities knowledge and practices of communities. It asserts that collections are not only series of objects or documents in archives or museums, nor are they more objects stripped of life, but they are also everything that the diversity of the world produces as a manifestation of identity in its processes of memory building collective.
Museology and Power.
In the understanding of the meaning of the new UNESCO recommendation on museums (UNESCO,2015) , it is interesting to understand what emerges in the relation between Museology and Power. Museology theory defines that the emergence of the museum fact leads to the creation of awareness of the museological phenomenon. It is this relation between the cognition of the human being and an object to which social relevance is attributed that underlies the museal action. I
In museological theory the museal action is constituted by an operative chain that is characteristic of the museal field. The operative chain is developed in three practice domains:
The essential domain, where appropriate safeguard procedures are applied. (the primary functions of preservation and research). It is a unitary relational dimension. This is a one-way relationship. The human being on this object, interpreting it, seeking to capture, (to some extent crystallize or cast). Seeking to immobilize some of its characteristics, either through its documentation or its archival practices.
The domain of interlocution, where it develops a relational, dialogical dimension, where in addition to the capture of the object, are assigned element of symbolic meaning, such as attributes of identity. These are constituted as heritage objects, on which the other primary functions of museums (communication and education) are exercised.
It is in this process of dialogue with the object, that from the look, or observation, an adhesion (or rejection) develops and that is a characteristic museological phenomena.
The primary functions of museology take shape in these two areas. It is from the understanding of the existence of the museological phenomenon that it is possible to understand the emergence of the third domain that is that of the projection where the museological process takes place. The domain of projection, where the procedural dimension of museology, the museological process, develops in a scenario.
The awareness of the plurality of contexts is what allowed the emergence of an understanding or awareness of the social relevance of museology.
From its role to society and the impacts that the phenomena of globalization and new technologies are producing. We know that the museological processes were institutionalized preferentially in a figure that is called Museum. Places where objects were stored, and where the visitor established a relationship mediated by a narrative, often only the hegemonic narrative.
The XXI century brought to the museology new scenarios, which incorporate, in addition to museums as institutions, other places and spaces of dispute of memory and inheritance. Including disputes within global social movements. Museology Space has expanded to territories (ecomuseums) to communities (community museums).
The museological process has been captured by the subaltern communities, who use it to construct other emancipatory narratives (indigenous, favela, neighborhood, Black Man) museums. In this new museology there are no predefined models. There is awareness of the processes on territories and on communities as spaces of dispute and social action based on memory.
Museology and the Creation of memory agendas
The emergence of these new scenarios that can be read in this UNESCO Recommendation on “Protection, promotion of museums and collections, their diversity and function in society” as an inducer of the reconfiguration of social memory management systems. The Challenges for Museums and for the Society of this Recommendation state unequivocally that the operating chain of museology must take into account the impact on society. It is not enough to safeguard and communicate, one must also know how to choose what one wants to safeguard, to know how to communicate it, and to know that this process can occur in different ways, in different contexts, according to the plurality of ways of seeing the world.
This is a commitment that museology has to make clear. A commitment to change and to the transformation of society, within the universal principles defended by UNESCO.
As we have seen this new museology that operates from two semantic fields of significance (memory / patrimony / preservation) and (resinification / accessibility / belonging). The theoretical delimitation of this new museology allows us to understand how the phenomena of memory (creation of relevance), heritage (production of identities) and museums (creation of heritage narratives) intersect with the field of the production of social powers, and the games of actors that lead to choices and decisions, which are successively appropriated and reworked in new scenarios and contexts.
The development and processing of information on memories, assets and their safeguards provide the information needed to analyze the system of “memory management” that UNESCO’s standard-setting processes design. But the administration of this memory depends, from the “notions of belonging,” which awaken the mechanisms of attachment, adhesion, and motivation (to memories, patrimony, and preservation); of the notions of “accessibility”, which provides the field of reading or spatial point and media appropriation; and, finally, the notions of “resinification” that provides a field of access to the content of information, its reinterpretation and reformulation. The code that allows your understanding.
The modes of memory administration constitute windows of observation of belonging, of accessibility and of the resentment of a social formation. It is in this system that the forms of negotiation emerge that the social powers carry. They are important instruments for the recognition of the diversity of human dignity.
Laboratory of Urban Museology in the Bairro da Mouraria
Cities are now places of experience and transition. Since the mid-eighteenth century, with the industrialization that urbanization constitutes as a phenomenon presents in the construction of patrimonies. What is the space of the “Spirit of the Place” in this context of transformation, and what response to social museology can give to these movements?
In 2014, in a reflection entitled “The Misery of Museology Reflections on Social Museology in Portugal”, we asked the reason for how social movements organized themselves, bringing new forms of organization, new ideas and new protagonists, and how museology society was responding to these challenges?
In Portugal, in 1985, the International Movement for New Museology, a reflection group on the processes and practices of museology committed to communities and territories, was established. This was due to the vitality of this social museology, largely inherited from the intense activity of social movements initiated with the revolutionary process of April 25, 1974. We then sought to look at what was happening in the field of social museology in Portugal, to look for reflect on the paths of social innovation in museology.
An article that then served to map the different experiences of social museology in Portugal and that allowed to understand that this new museology was developed mainly in the local museums in rural areas. However, when this experience of Portuguese social museology is confronted with other processes in other spaces, especially in Brazil, we can verify that these processes of social museology were developed mainly in spaces. Although the contexts of urban dynamics are different, this led us to work from three questions: three theoretical challenges of museology in our time of paradigmatic transition.
The first is to understand what it is to work with contemporary urban processes, where the heritage is embedded as sacralized islands spaces, which generated an architecture without scale, without memory and without relation to the surroundings. We then try to question the place for heritage in the urban context.
The second challenge is how we think about the present and what we want, as a future project. When we program or project, we always choose dimensions of the past from which we construct our real, as present. Being the present result of past action flows, our ability to read the present is only a possibility. A possibility that, however, affects the construction of this future. It affects it because it starts from a singular moment, which does not repel and because, like all actions, it is also transformative.
Finally, the third challenge, already classic in patrimonial studies, is to decide if the new project or program involves reconstructing the old forms and reusing them or building them again.
It is in this context that the challenging values of public policies for urban patrimonial spaces are placed and that they constitute the starting point for our experimental laboratory. In addition to the traditional dichotomy of “heritage / museums” and “cultural industries / artistic production”, we seek to identify how partnerships can be created between the State and Civil Societies for action on cultural heritage, involving educational activities, and artists.
If the value of culture in society is based on heritage and the creation of new patrimony, patrimonial processes in urban spaces constitute dynamic processes that allow the inclusion of successive contributions of protagonists and creative actions, which reproduce and recreate these urban spaces. The capture of the spirit of the place is then an essential element for the formation of the identity of the urban locus, to avoid its absorption by the dynamics of globalization, and in this sense become a non-place (Augé, 2005). As we know, Augé contrasts the spaces of identity, relational and historical – the “anthropological places” to “non-places” which he defines as his opposition, that is where no identity is produced, there is no place for the production of relations and no memories. They are places of excess.
Moreover, the creation of cultural reality, as a procedural phenomenon, is not an autonomous and random social process that exists in society, but is an expression of the action of its protagonists involved with its political dynamics. This is why analyzing the incorporation of the new contributions of the new generations as a result of their aesthetic, ethical and political expressions, allow us to find relevance that gives consistency to narratives about spaces. We must then look for alternative spaces for affirmation of these new generations, without forgetting that each protagonist affirms herself in space in terms of the opportunities she encounters.
On the other hand, it is necessary not to forget that cultural practices result from historical processes that result from conflicts and tensions, inherited and that express the will to represent the future of each actor. The vestiges of the past, monuments, traditions, places and landscapes deserve to be preserved and defended, as expressions of these tensions and interlocutions, constitute as echoes of an earlier time, of the life that preceded us, and which extend in them, and with which we can know better the world we live in. If these tensions meet in space it is also necessary to confront them to build new tensions on them. Cultural enrichment improves the ability to choose and decide and opens perspectives of innovation and creativity.
The urban intervention laboratory seeks to articulate this question of the “social value” of cultural heritage, observed as a dynamic reality, a result of the relationship between what we inherit and what we choose each time as our legacy for the future. The experimental laboratory of museology in the Bairro da Mouraria looks for the patrimony that is essentially constituted as the result of human action, and in its possibility of use as a representation of the future will. The Experimental Laboratory of Museology as an experience of History and a space for observation and updating of patrimonial policies for the benefit of society, based on the practices of citizenship.
In this sense, the experience of citizenship based on heritage as a value for society is an effort to create spaces for dialogue and encounter between inherited memories and cultural creation.
The Mouraria space is an interesting challenge in this respect. As historical place is referenced since the middle age, as marginal space, of the Moors, expelled from the walled city in 1147 after the Christian conquest. However, topographical analysis of space reveals a high degree of complexity. For example, the toponymy of the place in Nazareth, the procession of the Círios, the Feast of the body of God, reveal a complexity of relationships that are inherited from the time that preceded it. A complexity that will be maintained throughout the modern era until the present time . It is also in this place that is the Palace of the Távoras, a property that bears the name of a noble family that in the XVIII century vigorously opposed to the control of the tradition by the Marquês de Pombal. In Mouraria we also find countless references to Fado, the Bohemian song of the Noucentista Lisbon that echoes today with the patrimony of humanity. In this neighborhood are visible and cherished the references of his community to this popular song, rivaling in verve cask with the picturesque Alfama, now gentrificada by the tourism and labeled as place of Fado.
Finally, and here the relevance of the choice of this space for the laboratory exercise, is its current multicultural vocation. Indeed, the stigma of marginalization and exclusion that seems to mark the space has turned it into a space for the reception of countless migrant communities that arrived in the city in the 20th and 21st centuries. First, the peasants from the north, in search of industries and trade with a fixed and sure wage, after the African communities of the former Portuguese colonies, and the markets of gypsies, meanwhile displaced. The entry of Portugal into global Europe and the illusion of material prosperity brings the Chinese, Brazilians, Bengalis and Pakistanis, who gave new faces, colors and flavors to the city and brought new forms of relationship with space and time. This multiculturalism came to be valued in 2005 when, after the adoption of the Unesco Convention on the Protection and Promotion of Cultural Diversity, the city rediscovers itself as a multicultural and tolerant city. From that time on, the first efforts to integrate and integrate this marginal space into public urban policies.
Com base nessa complexa realidade, o Departamento de Museologia da ULHT propôs aos seus alunos de doutoramento explorar a riqueza do espaço, com a proposta de criar uma narrativa museológica inovadora. A base do trabalho usou a metodologia proposta para a construção da Carta do Património: Instrumentos de participação no Urbanismo (Leite, 2014), que se caracteriza por uma aplicação faseada a partir dum círculo museológico.
Num primeiro momento é feito a cartografia do espaço, onde cada elemento procura identificar relevâncias. No final desse percurso, o grupo reúne-se para apresentar as relevâncias, discutir e é desafiado a procurar encontrar pontos de contato e de encontro a partir dessas relevâncias. Selecionadas as relevância, o grupo regressa ao espaço, para procurar enriquecer e documentar os elementos, com o objetivo de criar uma narrativa sobre o património. Finalmente a construção da narrativa e a sua apresentação pública finaliza a primeira fase do processo. Na segunda fase do processo desenvolve-se a gestão participada dos elementos patrimoniais. Esta segunda fase não foi objeto da experiência realizada.
No exercício efetuado, uma experiencia no terreno, apenas se aplicaram os três primeiros passos da metodologia, não tendo sido possível, no tempo disponível concretizar a exposição (extroversão). O grupo, o círculo museológico elegeu três questões para identificar no espaço: o que se entendia por comunidades; o conceito de políticas culturais e o conceito de emigração. Ao longo do primeiro dia o espaço foi atravessado e os grupos procuraram, dentro dos temas escolhido, detetar as relevâncias. Foi programada um ponto de encontro a meio do dia, seguindo de nova exploração do espaço. No final do dia o grupo reuniu para debater as questões observadas.
O trabalho de campo procedeu ao registo de informação através de escrita em Caderno de Campo, de fotografia e de notação numa carta do espaço de intervenção.
Como resultado no final do dia foram detetadas algumas questões que eram comuns ao projeto. O espaço apresentava várias oposições que deveriam ser trabalhadas, como por exemplo a visibilidade e a invisibilidade das pessoas, a variação da perceção da cidade e da identidade nas diferentes formas de apropriação e uso do território.
Com base nestas oposições foi construído, no segundo dia o mapeamento e a documentação da experiencia. A cartografia do espaço serviu como base para discutir o conceito de “espirito do lugar” pensar sobre que narrativa poderia ser construída. Da discussão partiu-se para a busca dum conceito gerador, que neste caso cristalizou na ideia “Mouraria como percurso estilhaçado”. Ele procurava reconstituir uma racionalidade sobre a experiencia num espaço com múltiplas referências identitárias e com dinâmicas diferenciadas.
A Mouraria ao localizar-se no casco antigo da cidade de Lisboa, parece configurar-se, cada vez mais, como um espaço urbano, cosmopolita, que acolhe diferentes grupos de nacionalidades diferentes, que residem no local, surgiu como um espaço fragmentado que se revelou na sua complexidade. Foi possível evidenciarmos algumas disjunções que merecem ser alvo de analisadas com maior detalhe e que têm marcado os discursos e as políticas em torno deste território: bairro típico e histórico versus bairro cosmopolita; bairro exótico versus bairro difamado; bairro dos imigrantes e dos estrangeiros versus bairro dos autóctones.
Esse será o ponto de partida para o desafio de regressar ao espaço, num próximo tempo, para pensar que narrativa fazer, como fazer e com que fazer neste locus privilegiado na procura da sua essência poética que permitam a compreensão dos processos de construção social de imagens públicas, sociais e culturais, sobre um bairro considerado tradicional no casco histórico da cidade de Lisboa e que se apresenta em pleno processo de transformação.
For a nomadic museology
The results achieved are perhaps, at this point, scarce. In them, it is evident, and above all, that there was no exotoversion narrative or another extroversion process that would allow a more rigorous evaluation of the process. Also, some tools of participatory work are not mobilized. They did not deepen the contacts with the communities and local associations ended up. The protagonists and interlocutors whose voices that are necessary to include were not mobilized in a timely manner.
It was however a rewarding experience for those who participated in the experience, an experience of letting some seeds that are worth waiting for germinate over time.
Participatory processes are slow processes that require some management time. It has, however, an odd wealth to be able to integrate the complexity and richness of life lived in urban space. Each participant today has a clearer memory of the “Spirit of the Place” and the social value of museology. In this sense the academic results were achieved. There is the challenge of realizing an inclusive, inclusive narrative. From thinking about public policies that have participated and how urban regeneration can contribute to global justice. We propose for this a Nomad Museology. Nomad, is something that is in transit, something that does not have a fixed place. Nomad thought is therefore, by analogy, a thought that does not start from the pre-established premises.
Nomadic thinking is based on critical thinking, which affirms the relative character of truth, as something depends on the perspective of the process of observation. The same phenomenon can be apprehended in various ways by various people and for various reasons. Each point of observation and each subjectivity will have a distinct apprehension of the same phenomenon. Nomadic Museology is not just a metaphysical thought. It is in essence a discourse and a practice. Part of the experience (matter) to reach the thought, the reflective. It is therefore the search for transgression. A transgression allows us to challenge the real and activate thought in the search for some truth (which is always relative in this respect). Nomadic thought seeks to face chaos and excess, traces a plan and seeks to sketch a gesture on this chaos.
The proposal of nomad museology and that of mobilizing new forms of existence, singular, that do not fit into any pre-established categories, and categorization itself is a way of wanting to frame this singularity in a pre-established role, of which, in his nature of transgression does not seek.
Bibliography
Appadurai, Arjun. (2004). “The Cultural Dimensions of Globalization” Lisbon, Teorema
Arendt, Hannah (2001). The Human Condition, Lisbon, Water Clock.
Augé, Marc (2004). Non-places, Introduction to an anthropology of overmodernity, Lisbon, 90º
Bachelard, G. (1958). La Poétique de L’Espace. Paris: PUF.
Benjamin, Walter (2012). About Art, Technique, Language and Politics, Lisbon, Water Clock.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1998). Fields of Power. Intellectual field and Class Habitus. In: The Economics of Symbolic Exchanges, S. Paulo, Ed. Perspectiva.
Connerton, Paul (1999). As societies remember, Lisbon, Celta.
Foucault, Michel. (2007). The words and things. An archeology of the human sciences. São Paulo, Martins Fontes.
Honnet, Axel (2011). Fight for Recognition: for a moral grammar of social conflicts, Lisbon, Edições 70.
Leite, Pedro Pereira (2012) Biographical Views: The Poetry of Intersubjectivity in Museology, Lisbon, Watermark
Leite, Pedro Pereira (2013) Lisbon Sarawasti: The poetics of vigem in Lisbon, Lisbon, Marca D ‘Água
Leite, Pedro Pereira et al. (2013). Lisbon African City Lisbon. Lisbon, Brand D ‘Água
Leite, Pedro Pereira (2014) “Letters of Patrimony: Instruments of Participation in Urbanism2 in 4th congress of Museography and Architecture of Museums, Lisbon / Rio de Janeiro,
Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. (2002). The Critique of Indolent Reason: Against the Waste of Experience, Porto, Afrontamento Editions.
Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. (2006). The Grammar of Time: for a new political culture, Porto, Afrontamento Editions.