A ressonância afetiva das memórias como meio de transmissão para um patrimônio difícil: monumentos em antigos leprosários.

Abstract

This thesis aims at studying the difficult transmission of memories marked by painful events. The central argument is that communication of difficult heritages involves the sensitive interpretation of memories and requires an open means of transmission. This way, we concentrated our field research on two universes that were the inevitable destination of people affected by leprosy in the period when isolation was compulsory: the Santa Isabel Colony Hospital (HCSI), in Minas Gerais, and the Colony Hospital Itapuã (HCI), in Rio Grande do Sul. Currently being deactivated, but still maintaining asylum functions or restructured for the provision of other services, such places have been considered for their patrimonial relevance. However, they still preserve vestiges of their initial invisibility and their history is little known by the population. In addition, the patrimonialization process of places does not always considers the intangible dimension of these patrimonies, which preserves the memory of their last inhabitants, now the elderly. Another problem is the domestication of the past by the institutional memorials created in such places, which can transform suffering into an object of fetishism. Thus, it is assumed that the confinement memories are involuntarily anchored in the spatiality of the places and, intentionally, in the memorials and the last inhabitants allow us to converge the information of the space with the information exhibited in the memorials, filling the gaps left by the unsaid. This way, by creating an audiovisual material entitled refractory monument, we propose a means of transmission that translates our empirical material into a sensitive place and, by doing so, makes the memories visible and open to different interpretations of the past. We conclude that, since it is an engaged language that responds to the problem of opacity, contemporary art is articulated to the ethics that is in the basis of the actions of memorial transmission and allows us to capture and transmit dimensions not contemplated by traditional memory devices. That said, we consider that the contributions brought by this work are the result of a multidisciplinary view that connects similar areas such as memory, heritage, visual anthropology, art and photography, in order to achieve a broad conception of monument that responds to the problem of difficult transmission. Based on this, we claim that art and visual languages create places of memorial inscription that contribute to the extroversion of difficult memories.