Entre o folclore e o patrimônio: um estudo de caso sobre o Centro de Arte Popular-Cemig

Abstract

The research sought to establish a multidisciplinary dialogue between contemporary museology and the field of cultural heritage, understood in its different dimensions, to analyze the Centro de Arte Popular-Cemig (CAP), one of the several museological equipment implanted in the Circuito Liberdade (CL) in Belo Horizonte. With the objective of identifying the assumptions that guided the creation of the CAP in the musealization of representative expressions of the Brazilian cultural heritage, especially references of the art and the popular culture of Minas Gerais, contemporary conceptions of heritage and the thought originated from the Comissão Mineira de Folclore (CMFL). Representative of Brazilian folkloric thinking in Minas Gerais, the CMFL not only supported a practice of collecting art and popular culture but also helped to highlight them as constitutive elements of what came to be understood as "mineiridade". We sought, therefore, to understand how the cultural references of non-hegemonic groups of society are patrimonialised and musealized and to what extent the immaterial dimension of heritage can be recognized within the limits of the CAP. The work approached the CAP in the context of the creation of the CL, problematizing it towards the political and marketing questions that involved the implementation of the Circuito. The museological and museographic programs as well as the narrative of the institution in question were problematized in the face of the notions of culture, heritage and collectivist perspectives identified in the folklorist thought, and also in the face of the conceptions of museology and the thought of the field of contemporary cultural heritage.