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Billets

XXVIII– Art of Xávega

When a sailor arrives at a safe haven, returned from adventures in tropical seas, he finds memories. There are two lines that cross again. Line that had different, independent dynamics, that followed their own lines and logic, reconstructing their memories.
Over the course of yesterday, two stories related to these old stories, returned to memory.
The first was lived in Caparica, the splendid beach at the gates of Lisbon, which over the years has been transformed from a fishing village, to a bathing area and dormitory area on the south bank.
Throughout his youth it was a safe haven for family summer holidays. With the first heat of June, after the time of the popular saints lived in Lisbon, an old pickup truck arrived in the morning. It was a busy day at home. Gradually mattresses and bedding packed and loaded. Some pots, pans, dishes and boxed cutlery, sent to the summer house, rented at the beginning of the year, then the month. The family there would take baths until September, with the head of the family making daily trips, by bus between Cacilhas to Costa da Caparica, as it was a time when the luxury of holidays was not yet universal.
There were routines that continued, such as going to the beach in the morning, visiting family members with stalls at the market, for food supplies. In the afternoon, a siesta and an exit to the “woods”, where some friends met, books bought at the local stationery store were read (at that time I was reading the “Sete” collection. But the moments that were most pleasant for me were visits to the “Mouras”, an old family who spent the summer in a house on the beach, which meant that they would take their swimming trunks and we would stay there until sunset.
Sunset in Caparica is a sacred moment of the day. The moment when the star king fell over the horizon, flooding everything with golden rays and leaving the sea the color of silver.
Also at that time, the fishermen of the art of Xávega fell on the sand. With its fish boats drawn in the bow. Trammel nets with bag. Always bundled up to withstand the cold that is felt at night. And the end of the harvest, the sardines jumping, silver. Sometimes, I suppose it would be on Saturdays, we would buy a box there on the beach and take them home and bake them on the coals of coal.
At that time he was not a great admirer of sardines, but he liked that beach ritual and, with any child, playing without hours on the beach until the darkness took over the dunes.
Years later, as a young adult, visiting my aunt with a stall at the market, I was challenged to “do anything for life”, who is like my old aunt, Adelaide, married to a cunning fisherman who I remember blue and face stained by the sun, gave to “work”.
There I accepted the challenge and during a harvest, there and dedicated myself to the art of xávega. I settled on the coast of Caparica. At the end of the afternoon, we would concentrate on the “Fisherman’s Quarter” with a snack to appease the hunger, in case she came, because before she left the house without a good plate of soup “à pescador”. Then we went on a cargo van to Fonte da Telha, where the master and the arrais had gone to take a siesta in the afternoon, to observe the sea, choose the exit point and mark the place. As a rule, the boat was in the immediate vicinity, as each “art” had, as it were, a given fishing territory. A right that was signaled by the presence of the arrais on the beach, which gave an indication of the intention to leave a certain point, where experience and intuition indicated a greater probability of extracting a good fishery.
The “companha” was made up of about twenty men and women who divided the fishery into parts. The boss and the arrais had a part for the boat and the nets, another part for the tractor and the truck that took the people and the fish to the auction. Each rower also had a part. Whoever was on the ground alarming the nets had half a share. That was what I had to do at first, until I was considered capable of rowing.
And so I spent several months. Earned according to fishing. Sometimes enough, other times, little more than bringing some fish home for the next day, which were also part of the payment, in rules taken from the last boxes, which did not go to the auction.
And so I was an art fisherman from Xávega for a year!

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Billets

XXVII– “Something is going wrong in the Kingdom of Denmark” (The Place of Portugal’s Museums in the World XI)

Today is the International Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development (World Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development (https://en.unesco.org/commemorations/culturaldiversityday).
“Something is going wrong in the Kingdom of Denmark” wrote William Shakespeare in Hamlet at the end of the 16th century. (In the original: «Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. Then the character returned to the state of the Kingdom: the corruption, the betrayal, the revenge and the murders that took place then in that peninsula of the northwest of Europe).
Years later, the poet O’Neill wrote, “In the Kingdom of Denmark”. What will be in common between the two works? Anything. Only in this poem written in 1958 it was written “a goodbye Portuguese”.
On May 18, DIM 2020 was celebrated with the theme Museum for Equality: Inclusion and Diversity. Strange that today, in the “world of museums”, no one has remembered to evoke the ephemeris. Something is wrong in the Kingdom of Denmark!
How to resolve the aristocratic nature inherent in Portuguese museums so that – in addition to the solemn proclamations on the generic principles generated in conventional processes, they develop a practice of dialogue and innovation with society?

Categorias
Billets

XXVI – Museums and Africa (Portugal’s Place in World X)


The Africa we know or hear about today is a narrative created in our colonial past, however spiced up like other narratives constructed in the latter of post-colonial times. In our view of a continent, today we are confronted with the narratives of various African thinkers. Thinkers who think from Africa (from their places of culture) and from the African Diaspora. Let us add the thinkers who think Africa and its inheritances from other latitudes, mainly American (from the north and south) and we have a multiplicity of narrative and interlocutors.
It is not easy to maintain a critical dialogue with this long history where different matrices of the imaginary confront each other. Let us have no illusions about the differences between thinking about Africa from the European continent or the American continent. In addition to these experiences, there is now an African experience of thinking based on their realities.
For example, when we read the apology for “umbutu” as an African philosophy, we are rarely aware that this formalization is nothing more than an appropriation of identity carried out by Christian Protestantism to integrate differences. This does not explain the story but it helps to understand how the differences between looks are constructed. (See Macamo, Elísio (1999). Was ist Afrika? Geschichte und Kultursoziologie eine moderne Konstruktion “)
When we talk about the decolonization of museums, we are talking about the inclusion of the plurality of narratives. Of narratives that portray differences. In this decolonial museology, chronological narratives have to be subject to critical reflection. This is a reflection from the different points of view on the construction of coloniality.
For example, what was the heroic gesture of the Portuguese navigators (more precisely at the service of the Joanine and Manueline courts), even with the so-called contribution of science, there is, on the other side, of the peoples who suffered colonial domination, an unheroic reading , being the opposite of suffering and violence. In other words, keeping the narratives on a chronological basis leads the narratives to tensions and confrontations that are difficult to resolve to everyone’s satisfaction.
For this type of narrative, about relationships between cultures and about diversity, it will be preferable to adopt another point of writing or a narrative line that works on synchrony, which seeks to overcome the guilt and forgiveness that narratives based on memory and forgetfulness they imply, recreating new modes of sociability founded on respect for the dignity of different cultural forms.
That is what is intended with the World Day for Cultural Diversity and Development that is celebrated tomorrow. Which brings us once again to the question of museology in Africa. Especially Portuguese-speaking museology in an African context where, despite the various developments they have had during the last decade, there remains a museology that has made a very weak contribution to the enhancement of the museological experience of African communities, of and of the territories where they operate.
The question that we should then ask is how it will be possible to develop an inclusive museology for diversity in Africa through a narrative in Portuguese language in dialogue with local cultures.
For the challenge of the World Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and development (World Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development (MAY 21) is seen as another occasion to promote culture and highlight the importance of its diversity as an agent of inclusion and positive change.
It seeks to celebrate the multiple forms of culture, from the tangible and intangible, to the creative industries, the diversity of cultural expressions and reflect on how they contribute to dialogue, mutual understanding and the social, environmental and economic vectors of sustainability. Here the key word is active change and not contemplative observation of narratives from the past.

Categorias
Billets

XXVI – Question museums or story museums?


Ondem, May 18th, was the International Museum Day, in Portugal coinciding with its reopening to the public. In itself, it is good to reopen this type of equipment, which are places of culture. Culture is a relevant nutrient for human beings. As relevant as the food you eat, which are also elements of culture, such as forms of leisure and forms of sociability and relationship. This is a relevant recognition of your need.

As we have been emphasizing, in these international days there is a set of proclamations that seek to align principles. I may be mistaken more often than not, it is clear that there is a disagreement between the proclamations these days and the practices of museums.

In basic terms, the issues raised, proclamations correspond to issue issues, launched at museums. They must be approached critically. We rarely see museums problematizing these issues. Few museums that pose questions pose challenges, and many museums tell stories. As a rule, the story is already consolidated and corresponds to visions of the world and to the convictions of the aristocracies and elites of each territory.

But if this is an inherited reality with which the different institutions have been consolidated over the different times of these museums, it will be important to think about how their professionals can start thinking about a museology of questions. In short, a critical and autonomous museology!

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Museus e Cidade

Museums and Reality


Museums will be reading the reality of the world. This is about the societies in which they operate, the territories where they are located, the communities of which they are part. Looking over the various initiatives produced for this day, in the case of Portuguese museums, we find a little bit of everything.

In the catalog of Pporto de Museums (Portugal DIM 2020= we can have an overview of the different proposals, in this YEAR MARKED FOR THE “REOPENING” OF DOORS, after the forced confinement caused by COVID19.

Among the cases of museums that take advantage of the theme to publicize their collections, even those who sought to approach the theme by developing the “spoils” of their collections, or looking for new readings and narratives according to this theme, we find a portrait of this reality that it consists of Portuguese museums. This is a reality.
An issue that has been debated, under the great thematic hat, is the role that museums can play in reducing social inequalities. For example, in this two months of confinement, museums have strongly developed digital and virtual access proposals. One of the results that is already known of this “new reality” as a response to the pandemic, is that the availability of collections online is far from being used extensively by society.

From what we are getting to know, from the data of the “forced” to the digital transition, it is that this process accentuated the inequalities and reinforced the predominantly elitist access of the cultural. Museum professionals used a narrative and processes that were aimed primarily at themselves. This mirror effect of the digitization processes of museums is a result of their practices. Are the Portuguese museums, in this DIM2020, contributing to the promotion of equity in inclusion and diversity in all its dimensions?

Categorias
educação patrimonial

XXIII – Portuguese Museums for Diversity? (Portugal’s Place in the World VII)


Continuing the question about the definition of museums as an inclusive narrative space, in the previous postcard, where we approached this issue from the Portuguese national museums, we concluded about the difficult inclusion of modernity. There is some tension between the Portuguese national discourse, which seeks to affirm a socially constructed identity, with a deep connection with nineteenth-century historical narratives (of affirming nationalities); and the acceptance of narratives that assume the plurality of voices that exist in their context.

Portuguese museological narratives are essentially elitist and univocal (monovocal). Its place of enunciation is palatial, built on an ideological reading of history, silencing communities and memories. It is true that there are some exceptions, which confirm the rules. In Mértola, in the continuity of a work that comes from David Lopes, Borges Coelho, assumed by Claudio Torres in a context of a life dedicated to cultural diversity, some plurality of voices was affirmed. Few influences radiated, although Torres has a (archaeological) school with several works south of the Tagus.

We also noticed a concentration of this equipment, qualified as national, in the capital city. Result of the time of museums, it is certain. But also in the city of Lisbon, as we have noted elsewhere (The Role of cultural Diversity for Sustainable Cities, 2018, 144)
Here, too, there is a concentration of “equipment” in its historic and tourist “center”. We are talking about national museums and municipal museums. Contrary to what happens, for example with libraries or as cultural centers, the neighborhoods where Lisbon residents live, do not have museums. There are no museums in Chelas, in the neighborhood of Padre Cruz, in Musgueira, in the Alcântara Valley, etc.

There are no memories of the people from Lisbon who built the city, there is no inclusion work or about the diversity of the city. It is not that the work that is now subordinated to EGEAC is bad. The point is that a strategy focused on tourists and elitist narratives continues to prevail.

Inclusion and Diversity are now round concepts. Politically correct, they are not critically questioned by museum professionals. What does inclusion mean? Etymologically it means to put inside. As a public policy concept, it means bringing marginal (peripheral) communities to the center of public policy. As the idea of ​​ICOM’s DIM 2020 is inclusion in diversity, it would imply giving voice to the plurality of these communities.

And how do you work museologically with these marginalized communities to include them in their diversity?

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Ecomuseus educação patrimonial

Poetics of autonomy XXI – The Place of Museums

On May 18th, anothehttps://icom.museum/en/resources/standards-guidelines/museum-definition/r of the conventional dates is celebrated, in this case the International Museum Day (DIM in disciplinary slang), this year dedicated to the theme “Museums for equality: diversity and inclusion”.

However, the lack of definition about what is and is not a museum persists. After the impasse generated by the revolt of the “national committees” in the middle of the Kyoto General Assembly, in 2019, where the decision on the proposed definition was postponed, the executive committee ended up renaming a new commission to study the subject.

I have already stated my opinion several times
about the futility of this debate. To define a thing is to categorize it. Create limits on what is included and what is not included. The problem with defining what a museum is is that it is necessary to distinguish what the formal institution “museum” (organization) is about, what it does there (and the relationships that are established there (processes).

Now, we have known for a long time that the processes linked to heritage and memories, as social relations, happen in the whole society and in all social organizations, on which they build their mnemonic narratives of legitimation of power. It is not an exclusive attribute of the “Museum”.

However, there is an organization called “Museum”, which being a social construction, likes to portray its history as a “sacred place”. A place of contemplation that assumes as exclusive, because in it there are objects that do not exist, because they are endowed with an essence. This individuality is only accessible because it is mediated by a “priest”. The definition of “Museum” as an organization is a result of this debate over time, which reflects the different commitments about what is sacred and exclusive with criteria and categories established in a time of regularities.

Walter Benjamim, in his “Theses on the“ Philosophy of History ”, which I remember having a book in an edition of Assírio e Alvim (About Art, Technique, Language and Politics, 1982), speaks of the 19th century as a century of Museums. Like a time, where the nations under construction created narratives about an inherited past materialized in objects filled with aura (symbolic objects that had the function of allowing a transcendence of the individual and collective being).

Throughout the twentieth century, museums and their heralds have been cannibalized in different ways through different channels. They lived for a long time with other institutions of memory, (archives, libraries, universities), took the form of institutions (national museums, military museums, business museums, municipal museums), functionally specialized (art museums, ethnology, archeology, of natural history and philosophy of science). In some cases, they are modernized by building their own object (science and technology museums), in other cases by incorporating the social (of communities and territories).

Within the museum itself, where general and specific museology was stabilized, instability was installed, first through educational services (1950s), then through community museums (1970s), complaining about the “integral museum” and “museum as an instrument of development” (eco museum).

Between the first definitions of museums and their successive mutations and adjustments (for a history of the definition see hear, we can find the various dialogues and tensions experienced in different times that will influence the readings of the museum concept. Over time this concept varies and adapts. The current discussion is revealing of the impasse reached between the various visions in tension.
In the next DIM2020 we have an old definition that some defend, others consider as small to contain the new impulses. A definition that is announced to be reformulated and that pleases some and deserves doubts from several professionals.

What this means is that instability is installed, and as much as the current definition pleases many, it has already changed. Not to recognize the change is to do like the ostrich that hides its head in a hole to hide.

Will it be able to accept the challenge of Diversity and Social Inclusion?

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economia solidaria

Poetics of autonomy XVI – A Chinese world

There is no doubt that this 21st century is being a Chinese world. I remember with nostalgia a volume from the collection “Rumos do Mundo, edited by Cosmos, under the direction of Vitorino Magalhães Godinho, which made available in Portuguese the French homonymous collection, with the title The Chinese World. Published in 2 volumes, the first even before 1974. Mi father was a “subscriber” to the work, and as such he received the different volumes at home, in exchange for a monthly payment. The work was thus more important. I remember that at that time I leafed through the first volume with astonishment (the second vol., published in 1975, gave little attention to it), where it spoke of the rise of the formation of the Middle Empire, as China later became known.

I’ve never been an enthusiast for Asian issues. I did not sympathize, neither near nor far with the Maoist drifts. Still young, through reading Marco Polo, I followed the adventures of the great silk route, which then connected the east to the west. Then I followed the Chinese cultural revolution from afar, the death of the great helmsman, the rise and fall of the “gang of four”, the consolidation of politics a two-system regime, with which Deng Chiaoping deftly hits the “paths of Chinese time”. But I remember that on these pages I was dazzled by the porcelain and the history of this china, which is largely exotic.
Later, in adolescence, the Chinese restaurants in Lisbon were cheap and exotic, suitable for friends’ gatherings, which allowed, with their small dishes, the inevitable sharing, which allowed them to enjoy flavors, which at the time we thought exotic. I also ventured into adventuring with xau-xau and shop-suei rice dishes in the maternal kitchen, without much success.

Even then, the Orient was seducing a generation, either because of its Taoist philosophy (the meeting of the forces of Yng and Yang), or because of its openness to business, with which part of the new entrepreneurs tried to invest the meager capital accumulated in the then joining the EEC.

In the mid-neinteens, the Middle Kingdom renews its lost splendor and imposes itself in international relations with a way of doing politics that is very unique. Thus the predictions that this century would be a Chinese century were fulfilled. It already is, and we are still going through the 1920s. Chinese influence extends to the whole world. We know the Chinese intentions to make the “new silk route”. The famous Chinese surplus buys debt and companies (tying states and positioning itself in business).

Some writings on the threats of China, of its pretensions to an influential role in the current world, are piling up. We know, for example, that in this pandemic, China has insinuated itself, whether in an insidious way or not, in the various European governments, offering help here, over there. An agile diplomacy, in the face of the faltering steps of Europe that failed the first collective response. And the signs of danger of dissolution, the warnings do not stop.

If we need to reinvent humanity, we have to reinvent the place of Europe and the place of culture.

Categorias
Leituras

Autonomy Poetics XV – Reinventing Humanity

After the Coronovirus Pandemic Crisis, I have been calling attention to the fact that nothing will be the same as before. It won’t be like before because we have to adopt new standards of Culture. New habits of socialization, of encounters with each other. They tell us.
We will therefore have to reinvent ourselves as humanity. To look with different eyes at everything that is beyond us. For the patterns of new relationships, which replace the old ones. What new values ​​and what new ethics we will create. What new narratives will emerge and more than anything, what new aesthetics will emerge to show everything that is beyond killing each other (the exercise of violence), everything that is beyond power (hegemony) and everything what is beyond money (market).
A difficult exercise that we inherited. A world that emerges from wars, from powers that were created in violence with narratives that continue to value the market.
It is necessary to be imaginative and creative to avoid entropy, the exponentiality of gestures, the redundancy of acts, without experimentalism and above all to rethink the break in the relationship.
It is necessary to reinvent humanity!

Categorias
educação patrimonial

The city and the pandemic

One of the activities that is supposed, or at least recommended by ICOM, as the task of museums in times of pandemic, even though they are closed, is to document that time in the city.
This is undoubtedly a difficult task for most museums and their professionals who have long been confined to their collections and buildings. For him, what the pandemic has brought again, at least for some of them, is the total absence of the public. Forced absence through compulsory closing of doors.
Documenting the life of cities, their inhabitants, is something that we rarely find in Tugas museums. With honorable exceptions, these museums centered on their collections, do not capture the life of the outside world. Its professionals, trained in Portuguese museum schools, also lack the skills to do so.
This year, ICOM proposes the theme of Diversity and Inclusion as the theme of the International Days that is celebrated on May 18th. Beautiful theme, within the politically correct discourse, which invites, in a year of tensions around the definition of a museum, the beautiful proclamations of principles.
It is still curious that these major events are quickly appropriated by the museums’ marketing devices. Failures in actions, capture external ideas, take ownership of the objects intended for that “international day” (remembering the social inclusion of diversity) to sell their own product.
It would be expected, as museum professionals are recommended, that, for example, in museums in a city, activities arise about its most deprived populations, about the diversity of its people, about the problems that exist in this pandemic situation.
And with some perplexity that among the abundant virtual and thematic initiatives that are emerging, this pandemic that affects everyone, which keeps museums closed, does not see a proposal for action by the museums that it affects.
In my meager understanding, a museum that is linked to your city would be on the front line to face the pandemic. I didn’t pretend that life runs normally, in a virtual way. Debating is not enough. Action is needed.
My city:
I leave. I can’t find anyone on the path. I hear the birds singing and watch the spring in flora. If this was a normal time, people would see bustling, running to their destinations. I feel the sun on my face. I delight in the sweet breeze of the Swiss wind. On the way, amused to count pebbles, I get a call from cousin Ana saying that she is pregnant. There is life expectancy in everything. I keep walking. I get lost in the cliff. I let myself go where the wind blows. I will arrive at a good port.

Categorias
educação patrimonial

Poetics of autonomy XII –Lusophone Day

Poetics of autonomy XII –Dia da Lusofonia
With the relief of the co-ordination measures, greater mobility is possible in Portuguese territory. The State that grants itself the right to limit the freedom of movement of its citizens, in the name of an alleged public health benefit, now recognizes that the risk of spreading contagious disease is under control. That is, if preventive measures were taken, instead of being at home, in social isolation, it becomes possible to move more freely, even though these movements are supposedly justified by work actions or family visits.
The well-being necessary for physical and psychological balance, which implied, for example, a walk in a garden near the residence, was not under coercion or restriction measures. But these tours were not supposed to translate into long walks on the beaches or in natural parks, closed or limited in their use.
Therefore, in addition to working on access to the natural space, it was less protected by the hand of the State. In itself, it is good news, even if cultural spaces are found, with the exception of libraries and bookstores, they remain closed, with opening scheduled for the second fortnight.
Access to reading was therefore not conditioned, although I could not walk in a physical bookstore, we had access to virtual bookstores and newspapers throughout the emergency period.
Access to culture was thus divided between readings and tours. Both limited. Now that the limits are widening, we can, in theory, do whatever we want.
One of these things is to celebrate the day of Lusophony, which celebrates the 5th of May. In previous years it was just a given. Now, in the absence of a topic, he has gained more followers on social networks, who everywhere write poems and exalt the virtues of the language immortalized by Camões.
Among the poems is the number of speakers. Proud tugas claim to be the 6th most spoken language in the world. 240,000,000! Two hundred and forty million say proud.
In fact, of those, if we remove the 200 million that are in Brazil, 40 million remain, of which 10 are in Portuguese territory. Of the remaining thirty, among emigrants and inhabitants of African countries, their number is unknown.
For example, in Guinea-Bisau, of its half million inhabitants, 10% less will be Portuguese speakers. There the Portuguese is in clear retrogression, compared to the Creole and the French. In Mozambique, there is controversy over the choice of Portuguese, after independence, as a national language, with those who defend another national language. In Angola, between Quioco and Quinbundo, Cabinda etc.
We then ask what are the results of the strategies for the language, who does it and how it is done, and what results are being obtained. I do not dare to give an opinion but I fear that it may not be encouraging. We therefore have no choice but to continue to live in this illusion of the imperial language and perhaps it would be good for us to celebrate the dialogue of our language with the other languages ​​that make this language grow.