A espiral da evolução: políticas do desejo e o estranho-familiar arquitetônico nos 25 anos do programa ICMS Patrimônio Cultural

Abstract

This thesis proposes a reflection about the current dynamics of Brazilian preservation policies, taking as its starting point and focus a deep analysis of the Cultural Heritage ICMS Program, from IEPHA-MG (Minas Gerais State Institute for Historic and Artistic Heritage). This program, implemented in 1996 in Minas Gerais, demonstrates mechanism for decentralization and dissemination of preservation policies and actions, as well as boosting local management of cultural assets and heritage education activities. It can be taken as a laboratory to envision the effects of this policy on a smaller scale and, later, expanded to the entire country. However, after 25 years of existence, it is also possible to assess the distortions fostered by it, such as the encouragement of applying the listing instrument and the resulting consequences, given the lack of relationship between the listed architectural object and the urban landscape, or even in the relation between the object and the community. It is through a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the data treatment of these 25 years of the Program that the hypothesis is being confirmed, progressing towards formulating concepts which name the landscape now consolidated within the Program’s scope, permeated by the emptiness of meaning between it and the collective subject, in something I term the formation of heritage islands and deserts. To understand this heritage element, emptied of meaning within the urban fabric, it is taken into account the concept of the architectural uncanny, by Anthony Vidler, about the relationships between architectural spaces and mental representations in which the boundaries between physical space and subjectivities are impacted and cause effects on the interaction between architecture and the individual. Going further in this field, one comes to the reflections which tension the implication of subjectivity between the relationship of heritage architecture and the collective subject, and how, in this very relationship, one can find again the mechanisms to highlight the life power that the Cultural Heritage ICMS Program carries and which was so important in its early years, when little local heritage management was applied. The same architectural object which generates strangeness is also the one that holds within itself the possibility of, when treated differently, being reintegrated into contemporary society’s dynamics and resuming its heritage function connected to its time, acting as a catalyst for the resumption of desire policies of the subject who, in turn, is a direct agent in the promotion of heritage requalification and valorization in the city’s daily life.