Conceptual reflections

1In a relative short period, it has been identified that the implementation of museums of different dimensions and contents in Brazil has become a strategic practice, among other factors, in the process of clarifying identities and promoting cultural legitimation, economic innovation, and urban revitalization. It is a valuable tool for creating social, cultural, and educational representations in its landscape.

2From the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century, many congresses, associations, and research centers focusing on the museum, museography, and museology theme have sought to consider and analyze their role in more recent times (Cuno 2006). Along with the challenges of the economy and the politics of museums, the question about new artistic modalities and support for museums and the distance from their traditional sense as a center of artistic exhibition of high level are some of the relevant and diverse debates (Cury 2009). Among the transformations caused by society’s innovations, it is observed that the issues of material and immaterial patrimony linked to socio-cultural practices are currently configuring new meanings.

3The Sant’Ana Museum recently built in the city of Tiradentes presents itself as one of the relevant references of museology due to its architecture, resourceful archives, and origin. According to its creators, its collection is the result of a meticulous work of gathering artistic objects for decades. It puts together pieces and imaginaries that were in deactivated or renovated temples and homes of faithful catholic families in the city and the countryside since the period of the Portuguese America. In recent times, the emergence of the initiative of the creation of the Museum relates mainly to the artistic and symbolic aspects of the archive since it protects memories and recollections of rituals of faith incorporated into the social and cultural experiences of various regions. The Sant’Ana Museum demonstrates a new frontier in terms of collection and expography since it aims to represent and take in a creative dimension of the tangible and intangible heritages through its pieces and imaginaries.

4Addressing the tangible and intangible heritage becomes a great challenge when considering the urban space organization subject to tangible and intangible flows, representing the most significant space for function, performance, and existence of any stablished organization. In 1988, the Brazilian Federal Constitution expanded the Cultural Heritage concept and recognized the existence of cultural goods of material and immaterial nature. The category of the intangible is defined as follows:

“Cultural goods of immaterial nature refer to those practices and domains of social life which manifest themselves in knowledge ; crafts and ways of doing ; celebrations ; scenic, plastic, musical, or playful expression ways ; and in places (such as markets, fairs, and shrines that house common cultural practices.” (Instituto do Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico Nacional - IPHAN 2017).

5This definition is supplemented by the fact that intangible heritage can be identified through its transmission from generation to generation. Therefore, this patrimony is perpetuated because it is:

“[...] constantly recreated by communities and groups according to their environment, their interaction with nature, and their history, resulting in a sense of identity and continuity, contributing to promote respect for cultural diversity and human creativity” (IPHAN 2017).

6There is a consolidated urban center of a significant cultural and historical value in Tiradentes, and it is an expressive example of safeguarding heritage practices. Properly speaking, its constructed spaces and its relationship with the public sphere constitute the urban environment where these legacies are expressed. The urban patrimony corresponds to objects and spatiotemporal references through which the culture circulates. This culture refers to society’s spatialities, to the smallest gestures by which the daily sharing of affections, words, and looks are at stake (Maffesoli 1984). The spatial inscription makes the structures of sociability, and the social network has the physiognomy of the city and vice-versa - and from this network over time the little ‘nothing at all’ materializes existence putting it in place.

7According to Maffesoli (1984), the city of every day is the one where the affections are rooted, and the plural harmony takes place. Its diversity becomes remarkable in a set of questions related to social life and consequently to social memory. In the same way, space and time are referenced considering the categories of the noticed, lived, and experienced things (Lefebvre 1991). Identified in the daily practices, these categories define social constructions and collectively consolidated demarcations that, once established, consolidate the collective culture (Durham 1978).

8The demarcations allow interpretations that constitute meanings in the intersubjectivity gathered throughout space/time. Knowing the cities transformations with their built and immaterial heritage means thinking of them in the historical-cultural dimension, where culture is temporarily produced in the action. According to Sahlins (1976)’s analysis, the subjective concepts are incorporated in the symbolic signs in an ostensive way to the world. The action is composed by a past scheme that contains an inherited culture and a present scheme. In these schemes, symbolic action is both communicative and conceptual, bringing together the order of the material culture that corresponds to buildings, language, and subsistence, as well as the order of the immaterial culture, intangible, that corresponds to experiences, knowledge, and symbolic signs. Through this construct the geographic space, in which the natural landscape meets the cultural landscape, is fully invested by the collective memory (Halbwachs 1992).

9Like life trajectories defined by Lefebvre (1991) as the spheres of perceived, lived, and experienced actions, the city combines places with more complexity than others, in which memory is purely linear (Deleuze 1987). Spatialities have in their original vocation signs of this individuality configured in the natural and cultural landscapes when they are constituted as exceptional. The study of the city as the convergence of cultures expressed in symbolic action approaches the experience notion. As Thompson (1981) says, experience gives color to culture, values, and thought, comprising a mental and emotional response. This response comes from a social group, from interrelated events, or from many repetitions of events of the same type, which are transmuted into an intangible legacy. The experience notion will be integrated into the culture notion, and people will enjoy their experiences as a feeling, and they will deal with that feeling in culture. The immaterial patrimony is included into this cosmology, which involves the spheres of experiences expressed by symbolic action, by lifestyle, and by a doing mode of certain society.

10The Sant’Ana Museum differentiates pieces by their origins, conceptions and means of manufacture and all of them enclose a symbolic representation. In some of the wings there are imaginaries designed by qualified and renowned artists, and their origins by all means relate to ancient religious temples. They exhibit wide dimension works made with noble materials which ensure long lasting effects such as hardwood, plaster, and quality stone. The pieces like exquisite accessories are finalized with quality paint usually highlighted by gold and silver.

11Another part of the collection that is bigger in number but smaller in dimension includes pieces by craftsmen - a lot of times anonymous - known only in the localities where they lived. Those imaginaries tell stories of families and lifetimes, and they are produced with simple materials like paper marché, clay, light mortar, and low stiffness wood. They represent and affirm rituals of faith in Saint Anna, generally resulting from tough moments and conditions that define their lives. The appraising concentration of signification in those imaginaries, in the drawings, tones, gestures and position of the sculpted pieces communicates this cosmogony of what may have happened, resized by faith, and transmuted into the museum’s spaces. A symbolic crossing combines the archive’s pieces as a whole: the intangible conviction that the experiences and the stories of faith in Sant’Ana modified or affirmed the feeling of living.

For Williams (1977), cities inspire and set up a permanent feeling, a sense of limitless possibilities of meetings and movement. This author approaches the 'feeling' category by relating it to the search for meanings, and for lived and felt values actively and by composing over the years a structure of the 'feeling'. This structure encompasses ongoing or inconclusive social experiences, and these experiences are distinct from other social formations that have been previously shown and presented more clearly and immediately.

12Taking into account the reflections above, it is noticed that in their daily life the inhabitants often find places or reviviscences of the intangible legacy that allow them to reconstruct memories. Previous memories consolidated by many generations undergo transformation and adapt to a set of current memories. In accordance with Halbwachs (1992), these peculiar moments come from an identification process and are incorporated into individuals from time to time. In this sense, the city memory as a set of remembrances activated by the current filter constitutes a patrimony that lived by social groups is updated to each conjuncture of the urban experience (Ortiz 1990).

13The collective memory keeps therefore a space and a time in which the tradition of a certain group and/or a certain society manifests itself. The built space and the practices, and the domains of social life like an image playing a role throughout the history provides the identities’ constitution that make up the tradition and the feeling of belonging to the place. All these peculiarities which involve memory, identity, and intangibility transform each town into a single space, where the living place becomes life for its inhabitants (Thompson 1998).

14The main challenge of intangible heritage in the contemporary cities with historic heritage similar to Tiradentes is linked to a simultaneously contradictory framework. On the one hand, it depends on the history, the local past, and the policies aimed to rescue, preserve, institute, and ensure continuity bonds of these traditions from diverse origins. On the other hand, and no less important, its perpetuation also depends on the present time and with it, all the transformation period that it leads and, in many cases, indicates a permanent threat to these legacies in their material and immaterial spheres.

Intangible heritage

15The municipality of Tiradentes has its territorial formation propelled by gold reserves and agricultural activities in the early eighteenth century, then called Arraial Santo Antônio do Rio das Mortes. This centrality reached the condition of Village called São José del-Rei in 1718 with its development. Within this position, the spatialization of the Portuguese domain arises with the definition of the representations in the space, installing the Pelourinho (which is a column of stone or wood placed in a square or central and public place where the criminals were displayed and punished) and delimitating the space for the City Council and the jail house construction.

16Domain settings of the Portuguese Crown in this village features were made up of three main urban representations: (a) the mountain landscape; (b) the colonial houses; and (c) the landmarks in the space of collective and public dimension in which the religious temples and places of decision, control, and almost always of punishment were highlighted (fig.1). Unlike the other contemporary villages of Minas Gerais, in São José, as called by its inhabitants, the buildings of City Council and jail occupied distinct spaces; the City Council was settled near the Church of Santo Antônio, and the jail, in Direita street, which is the main street. (Lemos 2016).

17The village development was dynamized by the economy of the gold extraction followed by the agricultural production in the nineteenth century. Despite a stagnation situation, in 1860, the village had its status upgraded to a town by Law, keeping the same name. In 1889, in honor of the martyr who fought for Brazilian independence, the town was named Tiradentes - denomination that remains until today.

18Having been mentioned as a neoclassical architecture and considered modern, the Carcerário (Penitentiary) Center and the Chapel of the Rosary redefine the meaning of Direita Street at the corner of Cadeia Street. The chapel, place of devotion and overcoming, establishes a relation of compensation and smoothing with the jail, place of the restriction, control, and punishment. The function of the building's prison continued until the 1980s, which despite the occurrence of some renovations remained closed until the deployment of Sant’Ana Museum in 2014 (fig.2).

19Relevant details of the nineteenth-century prison space project can be found in the museum building. The sloping terrain very common in the topography of Tiradentes allowed the city occupation in two plans: in the flat level of Direita Street and in the proximities of Cadeia Street valorizing and accompanying its topography (fig.2). The solid and small monumental center justified by the small scale and the little sophistication in the finishes that remained intact predominantly due to its appointment as historic landmark and its register done by the Service of the National Historic and Artistic Patrimony of the Architectural and Landscape Set of Tiradentes Town, in 1938 (Cruz 2010).

20The Sant’Ana Museum has a collection of 291 images distributed into three rooms that preserve the original architecture with museographic supports in pastel tones with wide use of glass for preserving part of the collection (Gutierrez 2010). Part of Santana’s collection is displayed without protection and this arrangement intends to bring the viewer closer to the image which enables the visitor to be guided to the sacred places with discretion and modesty. The architectural, artistic, and museological vocabulary are retained in the emotion and visual memory that reforce the built environment and the sacred Imagery.

21The collection is rich and differentiated by its quality and versatility. It is a patrimony that combines the material and immaterial dimensions. The devotion to Saint Anna is represented in two instances (Oliveira 2000): (a) devotion verified in the sphere of the official worship of the Catholic Church that distinguishes the saint as guardian of the Christian doctrine and, therefore, this Imagery has inhabited the altarpieces of religious temples (fig.4); and (b) simultaneously with this practice, the invocation of Saint Anna in domestic worship of the family’s houses; this devotion spread through many Brazilian regions due to her assignment as the family protector and model of Christian mother, which also ensures the conception and children birth (fig.5).

22Usually, the Saint Anna’s image was placed in oratories of hall, often in alcoves, wall niches, on chests, and dressers (fig. 6). This image could also be present in the humblest dwellings, both in the countryside and in the city with the propagation of small images. The Museum’s collection brings together images of this saint carved by renowned artists when they were collected from the official worship of Catholic temples. Along with these images, the museum displays a collection of images originated from the popular production that are in most part carved in less noble wood and even molded in clay made by unknown craftsman artists.

23Saint Anna images’ collection integrates into this context as a diverse sociocultural representation and it can constitute a specific form of individual and collective subjectivity through a sensitive experience (Gonçalves 2007). Initially immersed into singular everyday uses, these objects are conditioned to a process of social and symbolic transformation when they are grouped in collections as the case of the Saint Anna's images. In this sense, the collection can be analyzed by its sociological function of mediating the visible and the invisible, that is, the material and the immaterial dimensions.

24These images gather and communicate memories of actions and lived experiences of life history known by heart, and ways and practices of the sacred. In these selections, modalities of arrangements linked to the art of doing are considered, for example, images’ categories (iconographic variations, family characters) and their functions, geography of their origin, proportions and modalities of the used material, painting and finish types, among other factors. All the details that make up the sculpture’s object are associated with different vision modalities, memory types, and ways of acquiring, retaining, and transmitting knowledge. In this journey from the good's making, its original daily use, the ethnography of its collection, and its transposition to new cultural representations, the collection exhibits not only objects, but a singular lifestyle. These representations emerge as if the subjectivities contained in the images counted on the spectator to ensure their continuity in time and space.

25It is in this aspect that the intangible heritage can also be clarified and narrated through a pair formed by the built heritage and the patrimony of movable assets of the collected Imagery. Its continuity sense runs through the rescue and safeguard of this Imagery and reaches its virtuality in the techniques of exhibition/attendance. From the collection expository quality, its effectiveness, and its ritualized descent in the sacred, it is up to the viewers to transcend the space and the objects’ own-time and to situate themselves in the timeless, abstract, and analytical space of the museum (Lemos 2016).

26In these new representations, the Sant'Ana's collection concentrates narratives, which are transmitted from generation to generation, from individuals to individuals. Inspired by Walter Benjamin (1985), the Imagery of Sant’Ana Museum provides the ability to exchange experiences, through the meanings of these sacred objects of diverse origins and materials. It is in this sense that one can explore its ‘Time of Now’ (die Jetztzeit) and perenniality (Benjamin 1987).

27Considering the reflection above, the Sant’Ana Museum, its collection, its architecture, and its insertion into Tiradentes’ daily life as a cultural representation, more than indicating the invention of traditions, they concentrate an inventiveness of these traditions, a place par excellence of the intangible heritage. These traditions are supported by the sacred aspect of the narrative, which in a triple initiative - architecture, museology, and Imagery - elucidates an oracle - a meeting among distinct cosmogonies that are rebuilt in time and define a place with an intense and expressive symbolic representation.

Conclusion

28As discussed, the above considerations seek in the first instance to elaborate a sociological analysis on the intangible heritage and its articulation with the city and with the different aspects of meanings which are concentrate and represented in space/time. Subsequently, these reflections intend to demonstrate how this patrimony, integrated into the town’s experiences and its representations, strengthens the material legacy and vice-versa, and how it depends in large scale on this landscape and on the policies aimed at its renovations.

29Finally, it presents the Sant’Ana Museum as an example of local, political, and cultural activity that can combine the dimensions of the material and immaterial legacies, values, and life stories of inhabitants and of Saint Anna’s devotees/collectors in this region. While it contributes to preserve the old prison center and the urban environment, the Museum has been offering courses focused on the art of making these types of sculptures in clay, wood, and stone - traditional materials of the region. This posture enlightens and strengthens other initiatives and becomes a reference in the local and regional context.