After being closed for nine years and celebrating the bicentennial of Brazil’s Independence, the Museu Paulista, better known as the Ipiranga Museum, in São Paulo, will reopen to the public on Thursday (8). In addition to being restored, modernized and accessible, it also bets on plurality and a critical discussion of the works.
To address controversial issues, the museum’s curatorship will use multimedia resources to propose new views on the exhibited objects. The expectation is that it will receive triple the number of people who used to look for it, reaching 900,000 visitors a year.
Monuments that honor controversial figures and situations, such as statues of pioneers, will be seen as historical documents, that is, works that informed or reflected on a way of thinking at the time.
Now, new views will be added to these objects. “The counterpoint will be other views of society on the subject. Every exhibition will have a counterpoint screen and an issue we are discussing is to open public notices so that people can sign up to create counterpoints for the exhibition. We want other voices of society within the university and within the university museum, not to be a single speech. We want a much more plural museum: this is what we are looking for at the Museu Paulista”, said Ana Paula Nascimento, a professor and curator at the museum.
In its first week of operation, the museum will have special hours and will be open from 11 am to 4 pm. Visits need to be scheduled through the Sympla platform and, until November 6, admission will be free. The public visiting the museum will find a much larger space: it now has twice the exhibition area and will have a restaurant and a viewpoint. The viewpoint, however, will not be available to visitors at this first moment: it still does not have a date to be released to the public.
Memories of Independence
The report of Brazil Agency was at the museum on the 1st of September. And, during the visit, he noticed that some spaces were still under construction or being finalized. In an interview with journalists, the deputy director of the museum, Amâncio Jorge de Oliveira, said that not everything will be ready for the reopening.
“We have some details, such as the new exhibition area [uma área nova criada abaixo do edifício monumento] It still has some prep time. In fact, the area will be ready, but it will receive, in the coming months, the structure for the exhibition Memórias da Independência. So, the engineering area is ready, but it will take some time to receive the exhibitions”, he said.
“Overall, the building will be ready, but evidently, [vão faltar] some details, such as the cafeteria”, he added.
The Independence Park and its beautiful French garden should be ready on September 6th, just one day before the September 7th celebrations at the site. “On September 6, everything will be ready. We have the restoration of the French garden, which was sponsored by the government of the state of São Paulo, and will be fully revitalized for the 6th of September”, stated Oliveira.
exhibitions
In the new museum, 12 exhibitions will be presented, 11 of which will be long-term. [que podem durar entre três ou cinco anos] and a temporary. The long-term ones were divided into two thematic axes: To understand society and To understand the museum.
The short-term exhibition Memórias da Independência will be on display for four months, but will only open in November. In total, more than 3,100 items belonging to the museum and 562 items from other collections will be on display, in addition to 76 reproductions and facsimiles. Most of the objects date from the 19th and 20th centuries, but there are items that date back to colonial Brazil.
On the axis To understand society, which presents the universe of work and the constitution of domestic spaces, for example, there will be the exhibitions Uma História do Brasil, Passados Imaginedos, Territórios em Disputa, Mundos do Trabalho, Casas e Coisas and A Cidade Vista de up.
On the To Understand the Museum axis, which provides information about the building’s construction history and its curatorial cycle, there will be the exhibitions To Understand the Museum, Collect: Images and Objects, Catalog: Coins and Medals, Conserve: Toys and Communicate: Crockery .
“On the axis To understand society are the exhibitions on the ground floor and the [andar] higher. They are the largest exhibitions, which are related to a research work we do”, explained Vânia Carvalho, professor at the Paulista Museum and coordinator of the design and implementation of long-term exhibitions at the Ipiranga Museum.
“In order to understand the museum, it aims to show the backstage of the museum, how the museum works and conceives. This is what we call the four “c’s”: collect, catalogue, conserve and communicate. For each of these exhibitions, we choose a segment of our collections, for example, in conserving, we use our toy collection. In communicating, we use our crockery collection,” said Vânia.
The famous and immense painting Independência ou Morte, by Pedro Américo, was also restored and will be displayed again in the Noble Hall of the museum. Also noteworthy is the large number of objects by Santos Dumont, among them, one of his hats, and an immense model that reproduces the monument building.
Painting Independence or death!, by the painter Pedro Américo, at the Ipiranga Museum, in Vila Monumento. – Rovena Rosa/Agência Brasil
The new exhibition space will include areas that were previously not accessible to the public, including rooms that used to house the administrative part of the museum.
As a result, the exhibition area tripled, from 12 to 49 rooms. “From an architectural point of view, the entire upper part of the building has been modified. We will have an exhibition area on the upper floor of the monument building. The fact that the rooms are interconnected is also different. And we will have new showrooms. We will have a viewpoint, which did not exist before. In addition, we will have technological and accessibility resources, which is totally new in the museum”, observed Oliveira.
Accessibility
In addition to physical accessibility, with the inclusion of elevators and access ramps, all exhibitions were designed to provide broader conditions for the public to explore the collection. For this, 333 multisensory resources will be available.
Throughout the museum, tactile screens, metal reproductions, dioramas [maquetes tridimensionais], tactile plants for locating visitors, audiovisual resources, olfactory devices, visual and tactile reproductions and notebooks in Braille, among others. All rooms will also have a tactile floor [superfície cuja rugosidade pode ser sentida pelos pés].
“It’s not just a physically accessible museum. It is cognitively accessible, with easy language”, said Vânia. “We want to promote the feel of the materials. Not everything is made with resin. We have multisensory resources in stone, in metal, in porcelain, in fabric”.
The idea, according to her, is that all people can visit the museum together, having the same opportunity to experience it. “We want people to be able to understand the museum space as a space for coexistence of diversity”, summarized Vânia.
More information about the museum can be obtained in this website. Scheduling for a visit will be available from September 5 at 10:00 am.
