Batalha de memórias: a pesquisa em instituições museais e a Ditadura Civil-Militar no Brasil (1988-2023)

Abstract

With the impeachment of former Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff, a former political activist, and the rise of Jair Messias Bolsonaro to the presidency in 2019, various forms of denial about the most recent dictatorial period that Brazil went through have submerged and have begun to compete for public space with the memories revealed by former prisoners and family members of political dead and disappeared people during the work of the National Truth Commission, which delivered its final report in 2014. Amidst all these events, it is often forgotten that not only do people produce narratives and memories about the past, inserting them into the public space, but also institutions do so and pass them on to society, such as museums, which do so through Public History. Thus, this work aims to analyze and compare the origin and activities of the Memorial da Resistência de São Paulo, the Museu da Polícia Civil do Estado do Rio de Janeiro and the Museu Histórico do Exército e Forte de Copacabana, both located in the capital of Rio de Janeiro, seeking to understand the narratives about the memory of the dictatorial period carried out by each museum institution and how this memory is passed on to the visiting public through permanent exhibitions and websites, during the period of Brazilian history of reestablishment of democracy (1988-2023). Therefore, this research sought to answer the following questions: how does the public participate in the projects of museum institutions? How do these institutions organize their collections in order to establish different readings on traumatic memories of this period? How did they establish themselves in a period of democratic reestablishment? To this end, in 2023, technical visits were carried out to these institutions and brief interviews were conducted, using the Oral History methodology, with visitors to these museums, in search of data not available in previously read bibliography.