Representações de espaços de memória: musealização da memória da identidade da colônia Castrolanda

Abstract

The research, based on the construction of the museum as a social space, aims to study the representations built by Dutch immigrants in the Colony of Castrolanda, in the municipality of Castro, Paraná, in the three museum spaces of the community: Museu Casa do Imigrante Holandês (1991-2016), Memorial de Imigração Holandesa - Moinho De Immigrant (2001) e Museu Histórico - Boerderij (2016). The methodology used was documentary research on the history of the colony and of the three local museums, together with the participant observation, in which I insert myself in the colony's coexistence sites, as a historian of the Centro Cultural Castrolanda, observing how the residents of the community represent themselves and resignify their spaces and traditions. Starting from the analysis of the elements used in architecture and in the narratives present in the inaugural exhibitions, considered the location, the disposition of the collections, the symbolic elements and, therefore, the representations constructed in relation to the memory and identity of immigrants and descendants. The research had as theoretical references: Roger Chartier (1990; 1991; 2002; 2011) on the concept of representations; Mário Chagas (2007; 2009; 2013) and Dominique Poulot (2013), in the discussion about the museum as a social space, Joel Candau (2012) in the approach to the concept of identity; Jan Assmann (2016) and Maurice Halbwachs (2017) talking about the concept of cultural memory and collective memory; Stuart Hall (2003; 2006) on the reconstructed identity in cultural hybridism; and the concept of “places of memory” by Pierre Nora (1993), allowing the analysis of museums through the triad of places of memory, defined as physical / material (the material space for the consolidation of memory), the symbolic (the representation symbolic of this memory) and use / functional (practice and expression). It was understood that the museum is beyond the perspective of a “cabinet of curiosities”, but a space for historical, memorial and cultural transmissions, a social space that musealizes the memory and identity of a certain group. Being formed by a place, by collections and by the connection that these two elements establish with the individuals that interact, be producers or receivers of these transmissions. The triad allows the understanding of the museum as a space of memory, which builds narratives and representations between musealized objects and the symbolic construction of an “absent” image, in the case of Castrolanda these images are the immigrant being and the Dutch being of Castrolanda, built in the memory and identity of the studied community.