Once Upon a Time (in) the Museum

Museums, over the years, have been experiencing changes in their collection, methodology, and services, which are mainly guided by the culture once established (^{Bruno, 2009}; ^{Cury, 2013}). This fact provides a rich diversity of behaviors, configurations, and movements that end up turning this space into something dynamic, or even “[...] a confrontation of metamorphoses”, as stated by ^{Malraux (2014, p. 10)}.

Metamorphosis is perhaps a term that best describes these spaces concerning the change of shapes and changes in perspectives. They carry history. It has been and it is a movement, given a set of crossings that involve the museums that are so complex to the point of going beyond it. That is why they are crossings. However, although they do not exclusively belong to it, they are constantly transforming it, though not always through a calm and reflective discussion. Now and then, in a conflict of interest. It is multiple. It is an educational, contemplative, aesthetic, scientific, and cultural place.

Thus, a museum is an autonomous institution concerning what it wishes to discuss. Therefore, a multidisciplinary technical team allies to the space, addressing different values to what is exhibited. Certain actions are then taken to promote ideas and interests and to achieve certain goals. According to the research conducted by ^{João Leiva Organization and Pesquisa Datafolha (2014)}, regarding the cultural habits of São Paulo residents and the use of their free time for leisure, museums were mentioned in less than 1% of the responses surveyed. An important detail regarding museums in Brazil, which are ranked among the least visited places.

Expography is one of the elements in museums that transport interests. Pondering over the layout of objects, how and when they are presented, or even if they are not, is important to elaborate a discussion on what the museum tells. This relates to what ^{Canclini (2008)} proposes, when he says “[…] to enter a museum is not simply stepping into a building and looking at works; rather, it is a ritualized system of social action”.

The objects themselves tell stories. They are cultural artifacts. The way they were made, their type of material, their use, and whether they still work and are still being used, promote novelty, or trigger the memory of those who see them. They narrate ways of seeing the world. According to ^{Nascimento (2013)}, although the science museum nowadays exhibits cultural artifacts to praise them or present them as they arrived in the museum’s collection, the use of structures and technological devices, in addition to new meanings, led the technical teams to ponder upon the exhibition.

The exhibition of an object is then an artifact that becomes a museum artifact in the science museum. It is also cultural, but with features that characterize it about the space in which it is inserted, at risk to lose its meaning outside this space:

It is an object that does not exist and was specially designed for the exhibition. It replaces, in science museums, the scientific concept or the technical device, considered difficult or even impossible to be presented. The artifact is then an imaginary being, as the visitor has never seen and will never see it outside the exhibition space, built to allow the understanding of the reality of the real technical device or scientific discovery. The context of the artifact is also a simulation of a reality not to be found anywhere else, but that reveals the point of view of the one who conceived it, whose intention is to pedagogically pass it on to the visitor

(^{Nascimento; Ventura, 2001}, p. 7).

The multidisciplinary team shows its importance in the artifact more than in any other sector of the museum. This is where the conflict of interests is more likely to occur, as its idealization and construction could be made in different ways, according to what is allowed by the theme or concept. However, even from the point of view of what is allowed or not, some questions are pertinent to expand the possibilities: how do you intend to narrate and outline the song of a bird? Or the cloud in the sky? Can I use cotton candy to make one? What about the symbology and life story carried by one of the oldest trees still alive? Or even the creatures that science has not yet unraveled to the point of naming and classifying them, but I dare say that they seem not to care much about this classification. Maybe, even after the recent pandemic, it is worth questioning if we, humans animals, understand other dynamics, other times, and logics implicitly experienced in the minutiae and magnitude of the diversity of beings included or not in museum collections. Faced with these issues, so relevant as provocative, it is important to remember the poet ^{Manoel de Barros (1996)}, especially when he suggests in his book, The Book about Nothing, that “[…] science can classify and name all organs of a thrush, but cannot measure its charms”.

Thus, a growing itch started, like an intriguing feeling, on the construction of museum artifacts. What are the limits of construction and fabrication concerning scientific concepts in a science museum? It is important to think that the scientific concept is discussed and questioned differently inside an art museum. The possibilities induce discussions and even create new creatures, like artist Walmor Correa, who gives life to hybrids from fantastic species of plants and animals. Are science museums also allowed to dream the scientific? Or even dream of an art of its own, leading the way on the possibility of discussions on the naturalness of the human animal? Is it possible to rethink living in coexistence with alternative lifestyles? Based on these ideas, a proposal was discussed and partially implemented regarding the elaboration of a museum artifact at the Cerrado Biodiversity Museum (MBC), a university-owned museum, linked to the Institute of Biology of the Federal University of Uberlândia, located at the Victório Siquierolli Municipal Park in the city of Uberlândia, state of Minas Gerais.

From Kneading the Clay, Idea, and Paper Ball

Maybe almost everything is intentional. It is certainly not different in education. Therefore, taken by the desire to explore other possibilities of artifacts, different from those found in the museum’s collection, predominantly characterized by the interactivity with pieces and puzzles, I started, as a museum’s technical-educational team member, to conduct meetings and discussions toward the development of some ideas. One of the issues raised was the lack of discussion between the taxidermied animals and the taxidermist who worked on them and among humans themselves. The goal was to induce visitors to question the human animal logic when visiting this space and, although the visitor is inside a permanent preservation area – as the museum is located in a park –, they do not feel like an animal. There is a gap that drives away the idea that, before anything else, the human-animal is also a species like any other within biodiversity, which is extinct and discovered almost every day.

The title, as well as the epigraph that follows it, are already clues to the artifact’s development process, which, like a fable, will be told little by little. Constant change. It is worth mentioning that this production was conceived long before the recent pandemic and, at the time, naturally, it was rather inconceivable to think that houses would be the greatest refuges before the rise of a new being, a species that produced a rupture, at least partial and temporary, in the logic of the human-animal.

Back to the artifact.

As discussed, there is a conflict of interest in the production. The MBC, through the application of dioramas with taxidermized animals commonly found in the Cerrado biome, games, posters, and some other artifacts, serves the purpose to present and encourage questions about this biome and the relationships involved in its constitution. The museum artifact, in turn, felt the need to discuss the MBC’s propositions. Thus, one of the artifact purposes had to be the Cerrado biome itself. However, it was worth pondering how to explore this relationship in the face of the multiple possibilities of interaction with the environment. The Cerrado biome used to occupy a large portion of Brazil; thus, how many and what are the possible ways to be and to live in it?

Based on the analysis of an environmental context perspective of this biome, I reach a closer understanding of a possible representation. According to a report by the Ministry of the Environment (^{Brazil, 2011}), up to 2009, 48.22% of the Cerrado area had been deforested, mainly because of agriculture and livestock activities, and monoculture crops for export.

However, studies conducted on this biome, like the one by ^{Machado et al. (2008)}, have revealed important figures regarding biodiversity, in comparison to other biomes. The studies point out that since the year of 1988, 340 new vertebrate species were reported, found throughout the Cerrado region, including 222 fish, 40 amphibians, 57 reptiles, 20 mammals, and 01 bird, which represents a total of 1/4 of 1300 species of vertebrates, reported in the same period throughout Brazil.

Different views. Different Cerrados. Different relationships. However, the choice arose from the possibility for, in addition to being a space, the Cerrado to be a place. A place of belonging, where crossings become ties. The choice was also based on personal aesthetic influences from the technical team. Even because the technical team cannot ignore these influences, mainly in an artifact in which what will be discussed (or not) is projected. The construction of an artifact is a constant positioning. What most affected me during its construction was the chance to observe the Cerrado and the possible relationship with it, fleeing from the culture-nature dichotomy, as well as from the idea that this relationship can only arise from negative impacts. From fire, deforestation, and demolition, traces that link this relationship, as I constantly do, to the unsustainable, even though it seems to be so.

The park administration’s intention to build a wattle and daub house at the site, encouraged anxious questions: how was the life of the families in wattle and daub houses? How were their relations with the Cerrado? Those were the type of questions initially raised. In the past. Something that would change as I would read. Trails that led me to think the popular culture through different eyes. Less nostalgic, even though one could miss it. Less traditionalist, as an escape to the contemporary:

When we doubt the benefits of modernity, the temptations to return to a more tolerable place in the past multiply. Confronted with the impotence to face social disorders, economic impoverishment, and technological challenges, challenged with the difficulty in understanding them, the evocation of ancient times reinstalls in contemporaneous life archaisms that modernity had once replaced

(^{Canclini, 2008}, p. 166).

It is not a culture to be rescued. It is then to free from a romantic and folkloric view of the countryside man. Shifting from an established and unified identity to thinking the movement. A cultural hybridization. Also, a result of globalization and transformation in society:

[Globalization] has a pluralizing impact on identities, producing a variety of possibilities and new positions of identification, turning identifies more positional, more political, more plural, and diverse; less fixated, unified, or transhistorical

(^{Hall, 2006}, p. 87, entry in brackets of author).

At first, the stereotype of the countryside man is perceived as someone with little knowledge and limited contact with urban and world life. However, this stereotype does not necessarily apply. The series Habitar/Habitat (2013), produced by Revanche Produções and Miração Filmes, featured on the SESCTV channel, showed in 13 episodes some types of lifestyles found in Brazil. Five episodes are dedicated to the house of the countryside men, how they live, and how they are many times the ones that build their houses from the ground up. Moreover, it is possible to perceive, through the episodes, the presence of Facebook and the Internet inside that house made of clay and lifted with wood beams.

Regardless of existing criticism made on the purity of tradition, as well as possible resistance from the staff that compose the science museums and control the education process to exhibit this immutable purity, it is worth highlighting, as ^{Canclini (2008, p. 165)} says. “[…] at this point, it should be clarified that the need for commemorative ceremonies of founding events is not denied here, indispensable in every group to give density and historical roots to its contemporary experience”.

Then, the overall goal was to build and adorn a wattle and daub house and encourage the visitor, discussing the objects and using audiovisual elements that (re)visit and (re)signify, from the perspective of cultural hybridization, the living and experiencing in the Cerrado, also trying to bring a little of what was understood then, regarding the poetry of those within this relationship.

Invitation to Home and Dwelling

However, would it be possible to think of another artifact, which somehow goes beyond interaction? An artifact that does not only work by pressing buttons, with wide touchscreen panels, handles, and lights? I believe so. It is important to mention that imagining an artifact that explores other characteristics does not reduce the importance of interactive artifacts, as well as other ways of outlining and presenting information and enchantments. It is not a matter of replacing or comparing the best and worst artifacts, but of creating other possibilities to feature certain themes in different ways inside science museums.

To articulate these issues and to give movement to the house, in addition to discussing the interweavings involved, there is nothing better than to inhabit it. Thus, the creation of characters who would live in it and who would be responsible to welcome the visitor to, perhaps, have a coffee and chat. An attempt to create stories to give life to these characters. Thinking that, although characters, they could be real. Even if real only in the eyes of the visitors who imagined them. Possibilities of people who still live like this, in wattle and daub houses, characters of the daily life of a certain Cerrado, occupying the house and turning it into a habitat, a four rooms structure divided in an area of 30m².

The four rooms would be composed of different elements and objects in each one of them, to resemble a house occupied by characters, who are not identities that once lived, but that still live. As stated by ^{Canclini (2008)}, in an attempt of avoiding a romantic vision, left out in the past. Focusing on popular cultures, with the purpose to emphasize how much they have been changing with the contemporaneous.

Thus, it is an attempt to tell stories to those who want to listen to them. The two characters initially created form a couple. The man, known in the region as Webert, and the woman, Áurea, famous for her crochet work and beautiful voice. Like a tale, they could be imagined at different ages, it depends on the storyteller, on the one who sees, and on the one who listens. Practically timeless. The only certainty is that they live in the Cerrado.

Some audiovisual elements were selected to induce interaction between visitor and space, to give movement to the characters in the artifact. They could sit on the bench or contemplate the backyard through the window, like fictional invitations spread out by the furniture, sounds, smells, and clay walls. Even between the cracks formed in it. Thus, just like an invitation, it is up to the visitor to decide whether to meet the characters. No obligations. Stay, sit down, lie down, or rush by.

Source: Personal archive.

Image 1 Front view of the museum artifact 

The proposal includes placing some furniture that could be spotted right at the entrance, set over an earthen floor. Also, a radio powered by batteries (wireless), would be placed on the top of a wood piece of furniture, close to one of the walls. A slightly husky voice would come out from this radio, apparently of a man, expressing simple words, but with a lot of experience: Webert inviting the visitor to come into the house, telling a little about what can be seen and who lives there.

Source: Personal archive.

Image 2 Internal view of the room 

The visitors step into the room and see an open window, directly illuminating the bed, but if they try to close it, even a little bit, they are surprised by a projection that becomes visible. A woman looking here and there. A look from someone that even in silence, tells a lot. Eyes that have already seen much, and that still follow closely to the movements and dances of Cerrado. Or of the trees outside that sway when the wind invites them to dance. Sitting on a wooden chair, she softly sings a song or a musical poem, created by her or passed down through family. Or that she heard elsewhere. Or on YouTube, maybe: And outside I saw the dancers and the musicians/ Who danced and touched each other/Changing/Places between steps / Orchestrated/ Of blows winding over there.

As she sings and watches the movements, she precisely crochets little pieces that would gradually take shape. It could be a blanket. Or a carpet. Threads and threads of crochet unwinding. And she goes on: And delighted with the movement / I inspire to create/ Drawing with the lines/ Orchestrating with the needles/ Stitch to Stitch/ High/ Low / Until the thread ends.

Source: Personal archive.

Image 3 Internal view of the room 

In another room, right next door, a desk full of papers stands out. It is there that Webert and Áurea would arrange a corner to welcome the new guest. Her name could be found among the papers: Thais. Another narrative in the house. Notebooks with scientific notes and drawings, but also somehow artistic. Scientific illustrations. Like in Biology and its collections, the biologist would collect assets together with the residents of the wattle and daub house. Material or immaterial. Exchange of singularities with the man and the women of the house. With the Cerrado.

Thais would document findings in a field diary, in addition to a taxonomic survey. It would also be an opportunity to interact and share with the residents of the same house, in the vastness of the Cerrado. Even temporarily, as she travels a lot.

The kitchen would bring knowledge and flavor. Or flavor and knowledge. No matter the order. Both side by side. Áurea would bake, every Sunday or over freshly brewed coffee in the evening, the famous recipe for sweet fried biscuit dipped in cinnamon sugar. Now and then, neighbors would gather to grate the corn and sauté it in a large pot. The corn straw would be used to wrap and bake the pamonha, by the lit firewood. Fruits picked up by Webert from the tree could be used to make jams and jellies. There was even a rumor that the two of them were planning to sell the products online.

Source: Personal archive.

Image 4 Internal view of the kitchen 

The recipe book would lie on the board in the middle of the shelf, by the bow. It would be precisely placed in the middle, to show that the couple kept the recipes as secret as the legends that wander throughout the Cerrado, and that belong to their memory only. They are engraved on them, passed down from generation to generation, some say. Fresh fruits, when not used for recipes, would be eaten with seeds, skin, and all. That would only be possible if not devoured by kids who would climb the trees after them, or by the birds that would leave traces on the ground of their feast.

What the Artifact (doesn’t) tell (or who triggers this Conversation)

As previously mentioned, the museum artifact alone already answers some questions, but not others. At least through its presentation. Even though a museum is an institution that greatly embraces – if desired –, not everything fits into this museum’s action. According to ^{Malraux (2014, p. 11)} “[…] our knowledge is more extensive than our museums”. Thus, the absence of some artifacts or some ideologies invites those who feel it to create a museum that claims to be imaginary, a museum not limited to what it exhibits or to what it works with. To the hug that cannot embrace everything. Yet, amid its metamorphoses, it is a place that necessarily embraces those who visit and those who have never visited it. It needs to be a space that instigates. A constant invitation to the curious mind. A museum that also respects indifference or dislikes; nobody can be forced to fall in love, or at least, it should not be so.

Thus, the idealization and production of the museum artifact need to lead those who explore it, and those who wish to explore it, in their own time. These invitations are museum artifacts that explore sensitive factors, such as videos, sounds, printed information, mechanisms that display systems in operation, as well as the capacity for interaction, allowing the visitor to modify the artifact, fitting pieces together, or pressing buttons that emit sounds and lights (^{Nascimento, 2013}). However, there was a wish to somehow turn the house into something beyond that.

To talk these ideas out to make them tangible, a confabulation was made with Mikhail Bakhtin and with two of his concepts: the volitional emotive tone and the unique moment. The contributions of French researcher Bernard Guelton on artistic fiction were also brought to the conversation. The wattle and daub house and its potential emerge in the middle of the conversation.

The wattle and daub house is a dwelling. Webert and Áurea and the illustrator Thais would live there, even if imaginary. They would be characters who would welcome the visitors. They would tell histories. They could enchant, at least those who would allow it. They would give life to the house. This house that exhibits an architecture. It is the reddish cracked clay. The wood on the wall, here and there exposed. The earthen floor. Some pieces of wooden furniture also occupy the place. Light comes in through the open windows. All of these together create a space that suggests, narrates, and makes possible, by actually stepping into another space, into a house with its details, something that transports. According to ^{Guelton (2013)}, immersion “[…] can be conceived as an effect of intensive and variable, physical and/or mental, and/or emotional presence, produced in a real situation or in a condition of apprehension of a representation, realistic or illusory”.

Thinking about the house, its residents, its objects, and its artifices, anyway, its context with the immersion that Guelton mentions. A great artifact that turns into a time travel machine that transports, taking the visitor to an imaged place. Although built stiff and heavy, it goes beyond materiality. A journey carrying the life experience of those who visit it and can make a connection right in the moment of the experience created during the visit. In another city. In another corner. Wherever they want. With other residents and maybe with the furniture. With a vivid smell of pão de queijo or a wet earthy aroma after a rain shower. As ^{Guelton (2013)} states: “A dive”.

Not a time machine for everyone, but for those who wish it to be. Although the intention is certainly to turn the immersion into not only a chance to enchant but also to learn, it might not reach all of those that enter the house. Or impact in such unique ways as the very own singularities of those who visit it. As previously mentioned, no one can be forced to like what they see. To be touched and to touch. Even though it is a large structure, like the wattle and daub house, with many interactive devices and objects on display.

Bakhtin brings out valuable contributions to singularities processes. First, the place I occupy as an individual, in my actions, is entirely my responsibility. They cannot be repeated by anyone, not even me. When I think, feel, and affirm, I establish a moment. Unique moment:

At this precise singular point where I now find myself, no other person has ever been in the singular time and space of unique existence. And it is around this singular point that all unique existence is configured in a singular and unrepeatable way. What is being done by me will never be done by anyone else, ever

(^{Bakhtin, 2012}, p. 96).

It is also in this unique moment that the house, as an artifact of immersion, was conceived. In the singularity of those who visit it and that may or may not result in that moment when they step in and walk around the house, a unique moment. The delivery of a unique memory or imagination. A feeling, toward what is seen, touched, smelled, and heard. Even if the unique moment is not related to beauty only. The beauty that common sense says is beautiful. Common sense does not lead the way here. According to ^{Bakhtin (2012, p. 128)}: “I do not love because it is beautiful, but it is beautiful because I love it.” Even if some of the perceptions made by some of those who visit may be similar when perceived comprehensively. It also influences the artifact theme. Then, the volitional emotional tone emerges, embraced by the unique moment:

No content would be achieved, no thought would be thought of in the absence of an essential link established between the content and its volitional emotive tone, in other words, its value, truly stated by the one who thinks it. Living an experience, thinking a thought, i.e., not being in any way indifferent to it, means at first to affirm it in an emotional-volitional manner

(^{Bakhtin, 2012}, p. 87).

However, this is what could have happened, once due to some extinctions, the ideas remained in the memory: records. The house, so lively in imagination, remained closed for a long time as it did not provide structural and logistical safety for park visitors wishing to occupy that space.

Still, the wattle and daub house was conceived and designed, even though characters and elements belonged only to the imagination, searching for the link described by Bakhtin, in the existing hope for the artifact to invite those who visit this immersion through the emotional-volitional. Side by side with the unique moment, which makes the experience possible. Something that does not repeat. Thus, the need for a free visit. Free from what should or should not be observed. Free from what must. No. No one owes anything here. There is no must. Let it be. As we understand that this is how the immersion should occur. According to ^{Bakhtin (2012, p. 129)}, “[…] lack of love and indifference never generate enough power to stop us and for us to ponder over the object, so every little detail and every particularity of it could be fixated and sculpted.

Thus, a wish to think of a proposal for an experimental concept of this other artifact. Immersion artifact: a highly emotional unique experience, resulting from the meeting between individual and museum artifact, using material and/or immaterial, scientific, technological, and artistic elements, attempting to simulate a given reality or multiple dimensions, as a memory awakening or even a dream and imagination inducer.

Notes on Dwelling

Now, taking the opportunity to revisit the words regarding these memories, there is a new analysis that does not erase what has been done but expands possibilities. Years have passed by and the pandemic event not only temporarily closed this house but also the whole world. More accurately, not the whole world, but only the human animals, who locked themselves even more in their homes. Curiously, those living in a wattle and daub house, inside a park, would be the ones less impacted by the abrupt movement of isolation, as they would still have a large area with optimal air circulation to wander about.

Even though the residents imagined and mentioned up to this point have not been living in this space, especially because there are no objects, sounds, and images conceived and presented, it has been possible to observe just now – only through this text and inside this context of ideas and relationships analysis –, that they have always existed, since the literal construction of the house. Other beings used to be mentioned only when observed by the characters outside the house, among those that currently occupy the house are birds that build nests among fallen leaves up in the roof, ants that feast around the cracks, taking advantage of every student’s lunch, the fungi that multiply across the garden attached to many plant species, and last but not least, the microbiome that also turns this environment into an eternal cycle of reproduction, passed down by generations and generations, in unrecorded life histories. Ecologies in a wattle and daub house that were never noticed, maybe because only one of these species used to be acknowledged, in this precise, but complex ecosystem.

These other beings compose the relationship among different inhabitants, others go back to a possible analogy with the words of ^{Duschatzky and Skliar (2001, p. 124)}, who speaks of human identities in the alterity processes that lead to the idea that the “other” is what the “I” is not to justify what the “I” thinks it is:

We need the other, even under a certain risk, as otherwise, we could justify what we are, our laws, institutions, rules, ethics, morals, and aesthetics of our speeches and practices. We need the other to, in short, be able to nominate barbarism, heresy, begging, etc., and not to be, ourselves, barbarians, heretics, and beggars

(^{Duschatzky; Skliar, 2001}, p. 124).

Would this also be an alterity movement toward other non-human living beings? The natural as something to be explored, domesticated, dissected, classified, or taxidermied, as the logic that perseveres is the domination of this other, of the difference, and of the different? Although not related to the initial intentionality in the artifact construction, there are other logics to be perceived by those who visit. In ideas that inhabit the gaps, living in ways that can teach other models of inhabiting not only the Cerrado but the world. It might be necessary to think of another idea of alterity, which could comprehend the differences among living beings with no totalizing classification criteria, considering taxonomies as a way of recording the life histories of this biodiversity.

Regarding these other forms of perceiving and learning, ^{Carvalho, Steil, and Gonzaga (2020)} make a valuable contribution by discussing a community that uses something called “power plants” as a way of perceiving and learning about the world, when plant species play a much more important role in the production of knowledge, as masters or teachers, while the participants are “guardians” or “facilitators” in this process.

It might be necessary, in addition to reconsidering the house creation process as a museum artifact, to also reconsider the house itself to get to know its residents, in mutating ecologies, seeking to learn from them things that only they can teach. These actions lead to new possibilities to question both the intentionalities in building a museum artifact as a resource in science teaching, along with its fragile attempts to represent such a biodiverse world and the very idea of perceiving a house as a place way beyond the one used for own protection of for protection from others, from a human animal or even from a virus, as experienced in the pandemic.