Memórias de uma forma de morar: a Chácara da Baronesa, Pelotas, RS, Br. (1863-1985).

Abstract

This research aims to study the old Chácara da Baronesa that today became the Museu Municipal Parque da Baronesa, historical heritage, located in Pelotas city, RS. The dwelling was built in the second half of the 19th century to house the family of Annibal Antunes Maciel Jr. and Amelia Hartley Antunes Maciel, future Barões de Três Serros. The proposed temporal cut, from 1863 to 1985, covers the period when the farm was inhabited by three generations in the same family nucleus and, after a period of decline, became property of Pelotas city. Between 1978 and 1982, the building underwent a restorative reform that prepared it for a new function: museum. It is intended to understand the memories revealed, or silenced, by Chácara da Baronesa, through the study of materialities that reached our time, uncovered by different documents, having as method of analysis the notion of cultural biography of objects. The analysis is inserted in the fields of study of memory, patrimony, architecture and urbanism and material culture. The farm’s trajectory was constructed based on the formulation of questions, whose answers were investigated in different types of documents, mainly those preserved in the museum. Specifically, we tried to describe the historical, social and cultural context of the dwelling and the museum; identify in the researched sources the farm’s marks of the different life cycles, related to the place’s materialities and sociabilities; and read the site studied in its transition’s moment, from private space to public space. It was possible to affirm that the interventions of the municipal public policies left marks, mutilations, absences and additions found in the farm’s study as artifact. The intervention, to change its function, caused the demolition of the structure that sheltered the workers, erasing their memories. Its interpretation as an object of material culture, through the biographical approach, offered meaning to construct a relation between the tangible and the intangible of its memories, its social relations and its role as heritage.