“Museums can not be improvised”: the experience of the Republican Museum “Convenção de Itu”

Abstract

In recent decades, museums have been objects dear to the human sciences, based on the understanding that they are spaces for the elaboration of representations about the past and therefore liable to be also historicized. These representations are elaborated while the institution itself is formed, in dialogue with its temporal, social, cultural, and political contexts, as well as with its different interlocutors and agents. Thus, knowing the trajectory of a museum and understanding it as a process is fundamental for a critical analysis of its performance, mainly in the development of the collection and exhibitions. This article joins this lineage of research by dedicating itself to the history of the Republican Museum “Convenção de Itu”. Our objective is to intertwine the institutional trajectory and the analysis of the formation process of the collections and the exhibitions of this Museum between the years 1921 and 1946 – that is, briefly preceding its opening in April 18th, 1923, and ending together with
the management of its first director, Afonso Taunay – to understand the specificities of this project, now centenary, and its potential repercussions in contemporary times. In this sense, taking the Republican Museum “Convention of Itu” as a research project was an exercise less committed to its political character, expressed in its context of creation and in the event that names it and that it intends to celebrate, but above all with its role in the elaboration of a notion of history, in frank commitment with the multiple moments of its time and potentially with the current times.