From shoeboxes to empty lots, Rio’s favela museums break with tradition
| Rio de Janeiro
When most people picture a museum, they might imagine hallowed halls, uniformed guards, and perhaps a gift shop near the exit. But a growing number of museums in Rio de Janeiro’s historically poorest neighborhoods, or favelas, are turning these ideas on their heads.
The museums are transforming narrow alleys, torn-down buildings, and even cardboard shoeboxes into museums that use the community’s own culture, art, and storytelling to draw visitors from around the globe.
Why We Wrote This
What makes a museum? In long-marginalized neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro, locals are dictating how their story is told through the emergence of informal, vibrant community museums.
One international visitor told Marcia Souza, who co-founded the Museu de Favela, that it was “the coolest museum I’ve ever been to.” That meant a lot to Ms. Souza, but she finds it even more fulfilling when locals stop to express interest, she says.
Rio is home to at least 800 favelas, where almost a quarter of the city’s population resides. Too often the neighborhoods are reduced to stereotypes around poverty and violence. Through murals, photographs, and activism, these community museums are taking it upon themselves to share the traditions and history of the neighborhoods’ stories.
“These museums don’t ask for permission or academic backing to become museums. They define themselves as museums simply based on the recognition of the community,” says Mário Chagas, a museum specialist.
When people discover the museum set up by Francisco Valdean, they usually react with surprise and delight. After all, few expect to find a cultural center in a cardboard box.
Yet that is precisely where Mr. Valdean created the Maré Itinerant Museum of Images (MIIM), a treasure trove of pictures depicting life in Maré, a sprawling complex of 16 favelas in northern Rio de Janeiro flanked by a busy thoroughfare on one side and a pungent waterway on the other.
Rio is home to at least 800 favelas, historically low-income neighborhoods, which house more than 20% of the city’s population. Too often these neighborhoods are reduced to stereotypes around poverty and violence, and the voices of residents are frequently dismissed and overlooked.
Why We Wrote This
What makes a museum? In long-marginalized neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro, locals are dictating how their story is told through the emergence of informal, vibrant community museums.
Today there are at least 30 community-centered museums across the city’s metro area. They’re transforming narrow alleys, torn-down buildings, and even shoeboxes into museums that use the community’s own culture, art, and storytelling to draw visitors from around the globe.
“These museums don’t ask for permission or academic backing to become museums. They define themselves as museums simply based on the recognition of the community,” says Mário Chagas, a specialist in museum studies and founder of the Rio de Janeiro network for social museology, known as Remus.
Mr. Valdean is a photographer and teacher who previously worked as a street hawker. He created the MIIM in 2019 to challenge the conventional idea people have of museums and offer a different image of the favela.
“Favelas are historically reported as places of marginalization and criminality, so we need images to deconstruct this idea,” he says, as he tinkers with a portable projector. It’s a part of the museum, along with eight small cardboard boxes he stores at home in Maré.
The MIIM has grown a collection of 3,000 pictures – some are Mr. Valdean’s own work, others are collected from various photographers, archives, and residents – showing everyday scenes of work and leisure in Maré, from the 1960s to the present. They include scenes like young girls carrying pails of water on their heads back when the favela was made of wooden planks, a game of pool in the early 2000s, and carnival troupes dancing through bare-brick houses.
The museum’s exhibitions can take many forms: Mr. Valdean has presented photos to children in schools, projected them onto buildings, and even shown the MIIM at churches and in bars. The museum has traveled to São Paulo and Edinburgh, and it runs educational activities, too, such as community photography courses.
“A museum can be any number of things,” says Mr. Valdean, who likes the idea of triggering people’s imagination with his portable gallery.
Across town on a hill overlooking the beach, the communities of Pavão-Pavãozinho-Cantagalo are not just home to the Museu de Favela (MUF) – they are the museum itself.
“We invented the technique of turning the entire territory into a museum,” explains Marcia Souza, one of eight locals who co-founded the MUF in 2008. It’s “an open-air, territorial museum, a live museum, a museum that tells the stories and memories of the people who came to live here.”
A circuit of around two dozen murals, brightly painted onto residents’ homes, invites visitors to explore the favela’s narrow alleys and breathtaking views – as well as its culture and history.
Rain didn’t deter a group of visitors on a recent Saturday, who dodged careening motorbikes and dog waste to view a series of new murals that pay tribute to a local matriarch, Afro-Brazilian music culture, and a Sunday tradition of community upkeep.
Most visitors to the MUF are foreigners venturing up from the tourist beaches below (they pay extra for a tour in English, French, Italian, or Spanish), but the museum was created “thinking about how it would impact our territory, how we involve the locals,” says Ms. Souza.
Having an outsider describe the MUF as “the coolest museum I’ve ever been to” means a lot to her, but she finds it even more fulfilling when a local stops and expresses an interest in the stories being told.
Like many of its fellow community-centered museums, the MUF is based on the precepts of “social museology,” a school of thought that embraces the idea of a grassroots museum committed to fighting injustice and representing historically marginalized populations by preserving their memory.
“Social museums are a decolonial practice,” says Dr. Chagas, the museum expert.
They can also serve as tools of resistance, he says.
Over in the city’s west zone, the Museum of Removals emerged from the struggle of the Vila Autódromo favela to resist forced relocations in the run-up to the 2016 Olympic Games.
The museum’s location on a map takes the visitor to a simple residential street surrounded by vacant land. A generic high-end hotel and the city’s Olympic Park are nearby.
But the place comes to life as museum co-founder Sandra Maria Teixeira tells of houses being bulldozed, standoffs with the police, and the victory of the 20 families who were eventually given the right to remain in the area. More than 600 other families were relocated.
With plaques highlighting significant locations, an online archive of photos and videos, and regular participation in outside events, the museum has the dual objective of supporting the community’s struggle for its land and keeping its memory alive.
Vila Autódromo has become emblematic of the fight against evictions in Rio, and “a lot of universities come to visit,” Ms. Teixeira says proudly. The museum has helped maintain a link with displaced families, many of whom moved into government housing down the road.
Despite the inherently local aspect of each of the museums, they are also part of something bigger, says Ms. Teixeira, sitting in the shade of trees she planted after winning the fight against relocation.
“This is a revolutionary movement changing conventional museums,” she says. These institutions “now understand the need for narratives … of Afro-descendants, Indigenous peoples, the working classes,” she says.
“And it’s changing how society views the favela.”
