Introduction: Personal Archives and Present Time

Personal archives, for historians, are situated in the intersection of carriers of memory records and documents of life that can function, at the present time, as testimonies of past times that constitute “the fundamental structure of transition between memory and history” (^{RICOEUR, 2007}, p. 41). Beyond the initiatives of organization, safeguard and conservation related to them, the personal archives keep, for historiographical research, its source value, since they open multiple possibilities of consultation for the construction of narratives. More than compiling documents, photos, objects, equipment, they function as databases, in addition to “constituting memory of the nation and an essential part of its historical heritage” (^{HARTOG, 2011}, p. 232), even considering its construction as “a collective project, in which many subjectivities overlap, moving away from the seductive image of faithful and authentic expression of the subjectivity of its holder” (^{HEYMANN, 2005}).

According to studies of Heloísa ^{Bellotto (2006}), a personal archive, despite its broad definitions, involves, mainly, a set of papers and materials, either audiovisual or iconographic, kept by a person during the course of a life. The knowledge, the records and the experience of research in this material constitute a varied and powerful informative source that must be discussed by the act of making history; and this will be the perspective of work with the personal archives of two university professors.

Without advocating greater (and very well conducted by archivists in training) technical abilities, this paper intends to recognize, in the personal archives of professors here in prominence, its possibilities for historiographical research, since they are “full-fledged history objects, in multiple dimensions (material, institutional and intellectual), and archivists and historians should have to take the biggest advantage to reflect on it”. (^{HARTOG, 2011}, p. 237-238). It is possible to observe, in this material in study, many apparently disconnected documents; but they certify and illustrate its highly varied character, in which the banal and the tragic, even the laughable, are mixed. In them, as historians, we intend to conduct an interpretation/analysis, composing aspects of those lives to, in this movement, assign “a meaning of prominence as potential memory or material pre-condition for future cultural memories” (^{ASSMANN, 2011}, p. 169).

To work with personal archives as sources, it was fundamental to trace a methodological way in order to think about questions that can broaden the horizon of possibilities around them to, from the present, grasp the possible past moments. The starting point involves to disregard the utopia of the global meaning and to apply the effort and the creativity in the modest, and worthier, task of opening ways and operating, not rarely, by tests and mistakes, in successive approaches and with ideas and values without pretension of totality. The treatment of the personal archives demands certain emphasis on empirical research and nonacceptance of easy and hasty explanations in order not to avoid risks of clarifying models that ignore the historical specificities in time and space. Thus, to consider them as documents implies to refuse permanently the advance of the simplifications and, over all, not to distribute certainties, but to instigate doubts and to instrumentalize them for its contestation from demands that emerge from academic trajectories.

What the personal archives chosen here seem to point is that time does not damage the events, on the contrary, it requests their analysis, allows its imperishable fixing under the form of memory. In the treatment of personal archives of professors which this research analyzes, they are considered as places that accumulate layers of time that had remained and had been modified, by the current research, in proper speeds. In view of this, it is the present that constitutes in a kind of guide and, thus, leads the gestures of analyzing these reminders.

These experiences that are present in the treatment of the personal archives that keep certain lived aspects of the individuals have affected life in the present time and in the “space of experience” (KOSSELECK, 2014), considered as a place that preserves a past and that it is materialized in the present in multiple ways: what ^{ROUSSO (2016}) characterized as “a past that is not finished (...) in which the individual of its narration is a still there” (p. 18). It is possible to consider that such experiences in this field have, equally, demanded questions that open “horizons of expectations” (^{KOSELLECK, 2014}) that, found in the present, aim at the future and intervene with the actions of women and men of our time, affecting their fears, interpretations or accomplishments of dreams, yearnings, hopes and, consequently, the way of searching and writing history.

For the writing of this article, one of the imperatives was to consider the personal archives as carriers of memories and to consider, equally, the memory, in turn, as a fundamental problem of history. The historian has the duty of memory (^{HARTOG, 2006}, p. 264), he must remember certain things, to be the guarantee of an intention of truth against the ones that want to erase or to manipulate history: it is his civic, political and ethical function. Another function is to work with other social sciences in our space of experience to construct, according to the proposal of ^{Koselleck (2014}), the horizon of expectation, that is, to construct expectations for the future. Today it is known that the future is not pre-written, it is necessary to construct an intelligibility to what was lived since it is not possible to sustain, as it was believed, that history has a direction. Today, this direction is to be constructed, it resends us to the present, to the still there. We have, then, to make it intelligible to find the branches of/to the future constructions. The historian must be the link of this passage; he must be very awareof the present, the present is the master category to articulate a possible future. Therefore, the questions asked in the present will demand the incursions into the personal archives of the two professors. The materials kept in these archives resound, in some way, in the present, since it is perceivable in the read materials echoes that were muted and create possibilities to understand past/present moments and even the silence of memory.

The interest, the curiosity and the study of these problems and by these authors were a stimulus to articulate documents from two personal archives of professors who worked at the Federal Universities of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) and Santa Catarina (UFSC). The safeguarded documents allowed to construct a narrative that joined aspects of individual and collective actions, which crossed the daily and academic life of Balduíno Andreola (UFRGS) and Walter Fernando Piazza (UFSC), between the decades of 1950 and 1990. They allowed, over all, to question the techniques of keeping the resources, which led to a certain musealization of their memories, since they were situated in public places with unrestricted consultation.

1. The archive of Walter Fernando Piazza: In the thresholds of the research

The archive is presented as the physical place that shelters the destination of this kind of track that we carefully distinguish from the cerebral track and the affective track, namely the documentary track (^{RICOEUR, 2007}, p. 177).

Considered polysemic (carrying many meanings) and polyphonic (with a multiplicity of voices), the personal archives keep documentary tracks of the past and can be conceived as a result of the persistence of a certain personality or even a common person in bequeathing and even imposing, to the future, an image of himself. Carriers of different kinds of records open access to what is called the past. In them, everything deserves to be remembered, since to hear the voices that emerge from these records is to be open and aware of other formulations. As in a musical partition, materials preserved must be analyzed and be executed, to gain life in the interpretation of the ones that lend more than eyes and ears; that is, to transform concerns into interests. Then, it is up to the researcher to ask the questions for which the stored documents can become a reply. After all, if the archives are essential, so are the possibilities of historicizing them. This is still a consolation for researchers.

In the intention to situate the persona whose personal archive has the protagonism in this article, it is fundamental to delineate aspects of the trajectory of Professor Walter Fernando Piazza. From Santa Catarina, he was born in November 6th, 1925, in the city of Nova Trento, and died in February 9th, 2016, in the city of Florianópolis. He was, since the decade of 1960, a professor at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC); his main research studies concerned popular culture, folklore, migratory flows and archaeology of the state of Santa Catarina. He was the creator and first Coordinator of the Graduate Program in History, in 1975; in addition, he was a professor at the University of the State of Santa Catarina (UDESC) and of the University of the Vale do Itajaí (UNIVALI), in Santa Catarina. It is also worth highlighting his performance as President of the Historical and Geographic Institute of Santa Catarina (IHGSC) and member of some national and international institutions of historical research, such as the Historical Institute of the Terceira Island, in the Azores (Portugal). In the decade of 1960, he participated in the National Program of Archaeological Research, conducting a survey in Santa Catarina, including the Valley of Chapecó, the Uruguay River, the valley of Rio do Peixe and the valley of Itajaí. He left a vast work on the History of Santa Catarina.²

Source: PiazzaArchive/IDCH/UDESC/2018

Photo 1: Professor Walter Fernando Piazza 

His personal archive was donated, by the family, in 2016, to the Institute of Documentation and Research in Human Sciences (IDCH)³ associated to the UDESC University, and is available, with about five thousand pieces, already scanned, for online consultation.⁴ The donated materials compose a rich documentary set (personal books, magazines, diplomas, personal calendars, photos, letters, etc.) in addition to objects and awards received throughout his career. This stockpile of documents arrived at the IDCH in boxes and was organized by the three daughters (a historian, a librarian and an architect) and allows one to think about the possibility of a process of selection/sorting, which is common in the donation of personal archives.

The studies of the historian Angela de Castro ^{Gomes (1998}), which involve personal archives, show the “illusion of the truth” and highlight the recurrent concerns with the interpretation and exegeses techniques that do not dismiss metaphor and image, and lead to the interest for the history of archives as an experience of keeping, of memory and (ack)knowledge. According to this author, the proximity with which the researcher deals with documents can induce to the illusion that the writings are "spontaneous", "authentic'' or carriers of “the truth'', disregarding that they were "constructed by an author and that are transformed over time, assuming different forms and even different colors'' (1998, p. 126). Since the resources were chosen and delivered to the IDCH, it is fundamental to recognize, therefore, a partiality in the selection, made by the researcher in the documentary treatment, and a probable sorting processconducted by the family; these are current situations that blur attempts to produce an absolute knowledge on the subject, even though they are not an impediment for research.

The career of Walter Fernando Piazza comprises the exercise and, not rarely, the accumulation of administrative and educational duties and the interaction between research, teaching and education of new professionals, in addition to the interlocution with foreign (especially Portuguese and North-American) historians⁵, which gave him possibilities of participation in a program of international projection, and contact with Brazilianists who, between 1976 and 1980, integrated the personnel of the Graduate Program in History of the Federal University of Santa Catarina⁶. Such protagonisms allow one to consider him as a practitioner of cultural mediation, which is also called mediating intellectual (GOMES, 2016).

we recognize that the practices of cultural mediation can be exerted by a diversified set of actors, whose presence and importance in various societies and cultures are of great relevance, however, not always with acknowledgement (p. 9).

In the personal archive of Walter Fernando Piazza, remnants and details of a life are materialized in written documents and objects that enhance a memory of his trajectory, his readings, effective actions, deadlines met. The singularity and certain originality of the trajectory of Professor Piazza singularizes him before the other members of his generation in Santa Catarina and is tied with the attention that he granted to research in archives, to paper-document safekeeping, which keep their value as sources for researchers.

1. In the archive of Walter Fernando Piazza: Appointment books in a documentary frenzy

Regardless of the stunts of documentary history - positivism or not - the documentary frenzy took over time (^{RICOEUR, 2007}, p. 179).

The documents of the Piazza archive embody and awaken a certain magic, either by the order through which they were organized, either by the care for being donated with a documentary organization set up by his daughters, whose logistic was kept in the room of the institution that shelters it (IDCH/UDESC) and, over all, by documents and objects that integrate it. For being available to consultation in a safekeeping institution, they evoke a “documentary frenzy” and “a pedagogy of the memory, that is, of a framing of the memory culture for an educational project” (^{RICOEUR, 2007}, p. 81). To consider this archive as an educational project involves to recognize that, through it, it is possible to conduct studies and to mobilize imaginative and technical procedures to explore documentary sources that approach an educational dimension and gain importance for the Brazilian and Santa Catarina History of Education, between the decades of 1950 and 1990. It is also possible to consider its character of historical-educational heritage, evidence guaranteed by its great documentary value and for being safeguarded in a public institution of the State, which gives it some prominence. The collisions between the moment of the donation/selection by the family and the organization promoted when it was installed in the collection are constituted as part of a musealization process that includes the construction and consolidation of a memory (^{CUNHA, 2019}, p. 78).

Kept in a special room at the IDCH/UDESC, there are books, magazines, special documents and a multitude of other materials that are already catalogued and available to public consultation. Heterodox and enigmatic, shrouded in apparent triviality, personal appointment books, various certificates, course and lesson plans, letters, awards, and publication drafts point to these documents called ordinary or loose, which propitiate the emergency of a set of questions that have as horizon the perspective of mapping the area of cultural and teaching practices of their owner.

At this first moment, in the thresholds of the archive, initial movements of immersion in the archive are in progress, showing its dynamic insertion in the Santa Catarina and Brazilian historiographic scenario of the period⁷ and giving visibility to materials/documents that will subsidize future research studies. A first general survey of the separate documents (official letters, correspondences, awards, certificates of events, and diverse pages) was conducted, which totalized 1338 pieces and contribute to draw the contours of the archive, composed of materials that announce different forms of communication and offer curious tracks for research studies regarding the cultural universe in which Piazza was immersed.

The number of received and kept correspondences is very significant. The letters are varied, from some Brazilian states, from Portugal, Mexico, Uruguay, Argentina, United States, Colombia, for example, which confirm the internationalization of his works and activities and, over all, his relations of power and prestige in the professional domain. Such sources remain open and available for future researchers. A first look allows to consider that many of the texts of the correspondences are in the protocol limits of a formal writing, but this does not require more vigorous research.

Source: Archive of the author

Photo 2 Drawer at the IDCH/UDESC with the appointment books 

Kept in drawers, a set of personal appointment books -used between 1978 and 1996 - register the minor and simpler daily activities related to his activity of professor (meetings, participation in Masters and Doctoral defenses, conferences, bureaucratic notices to be given, commentaries); the familiar events (birthdays, moments of happiness with the family, travel itineraries), and the record of satisfactory moments (description of homages and awards received). Records of daily procedures open possibilities of recognizing the organic relation between the past and the present time, articulating personal relations with the public institutions that are cited in the appointment books.

Almost always with leather cover, the agendas work as sources where historians can seek meanings for these experiences under the prism of the History of Education, over all those notes referring to formal education, such as: cited institutions, courses and conferences, participation in public hiring processes, in Masters and Doctoral defenses, academic and political meetings, awards received. Such notations registered in the archivistic material indicate different traces to track nets of sociability, to know different experiences, traces of narrated facts, ideas, opinions and emotional reactions with regard to the university environment, teaching and research activities, bibliography selection and indication, historiographical critics, in addition to other experiences recorded through the act of writing.

These intimate documents from personal archives generate a sense of enchantment, understood here as capable of “transmitting a ravishing feeling of unicity, evoking an exalted attention”, in the perspective raised by (GRENBLATT, 1991, p. 250), which also makes visible the daily activities of their possessors. The studies of Catherine ^{Hobbs (2018}) point its importance with respect to historical research:

personal archives register activities of individuals, but what is registered in them is the particular, idiosyncratic and singular perspective of people when they are doing the things they do and commenting on it. […] they are sources of information on the personal life and daily relations. They are the place where personality and facts of life interact in a documentary way (p.262).

The studies on appointment books conducted by ^{Ramos (2000}) highlight this perspective and indicate that, even though they can be considered as ordinary documents, them they help to preserve a certain identity in the form of a memory, a language, a landscape and a way of life. According to the author:

These elements give to appointment books the statute of “narratives of the self” and allow, through them, to demarcate new routes within the auto-referential studies, for what they have of textual production and construction, and for the belief that, just as journals, these appointment books recreate lives, write stories, fill gaps, becoming a second thing, more reflected and emblematic (p. 198).

This article is tributary of the current (and still partial) intervention in the personal archive of Walter Fernando Piazza and has privileged these sources with the intention of thinking about aspects of life trajectories in the present time, from minor, mostly neglected documents. The appointment books were separated, photographed, and an immersion in them will be one of the actions to be performed, in the continuation of the research, which is still in its beginning. Through these documentary vestiges, it seeks to make sense of these experiences under the prism of the History of Education - as product of a cultural construction in articulation with its social dimension assumed by notions such as representations, practices and materiality of these cultural objects - (^{CARVALHO and PINTASSILGO, 2011}); of the History of the Present Time -which considers the secular experiences of history and the way, “in each present moment, the secular dimensions of the past and of the future are linked” (^{HARTOG, 2006}, p. 263). In addition, dialogues in the intersection of the studies on Cultural Heritage are considered, due to the analysis of the instances that safekeep and characterize personal archives as historical-educational (MENEZES, 2005 and 2016).

At the present time, there was a resignification of the research studies on the arts of keeping that brought forth new paradigms, focused on the study of the sensibilities, of the testimonies, which characterizes a return to the significant self without the pretension of being the key of explicitness of history paths. In this perspective, the study with and of personal archives refers to this historiographic movement in which there is incentive and freedom in the choice of objects and peculiar ways of interpreting them. After all, nobody comes close to these materials with ingenuous or free eyes, but from historically outlined perspectives that derive from a set of questions that involve, equally, empiricism, theories, enchantments and sensibilities and have as horizon the perspective of an intervention in the course of the world. The historian can be one of the links of this passage.

2. “They are at liberty…”: the personal archive of professor Balduíno Andreolla

2.1 Approach of the archive and its holder

When investigating the personal archive of the emeritus professor at UFRGS University, Balduíno Andreola, one recognizes his gestures of keeping and donating, sensible signs of an intellectual, moved by the alive desire of keeping alive memories of his actions at UFRGS. Stored in bags and folders, there were fragments of a time of teaching experience, organized with delicacy, as a production of the self. In this process of accumulation, printed matters and manuscripts allusive to the different places where Balduíno worked at the Faculty of Education/UFRGS mingle.

One of the challenges, when operating with these papers, is to seek to understand what kind of arrangement the professor sought to make in this filing process, considering the different textual modalities, understood as dimensions of his teaching life, which represent the different places where he was at the Faculty. According to ^{Cox (2017}), even amid apparently disordered papers, it is possible to locate valuable information of the memory of the individual and the institution to which he belonged, in his words “the way we accumulate and organize documents has something important to tell us. The personal archive can be seen as a crucial aspect of the knowledge of ourselves” (p.256). This issue brought by Cox is absolutely important to the personal archive that is examined here. Thus, in the conserved documentation, there are notes he received from colleagues, correspondences, a few books, invitations to graduation ceremonies, programs of classes, poems of his own, newspaper articles, official letters from the university, printed texts, many newspaper clippings, pamphlets of academic events, among others. Having as inspiration Chico Buarque's song lyric “Todo o sentimento”, it is possible to understand this documentary set as kind of repository of “a time that remakes what it undid”, that is, as an attempt of its holder to recompose the past experiences, lived in the University, by means of these archiving practices.

Before approaching the archive itself, it matters to present its holder⁹. Balduíno was born in 1936, he is the first one of eleven children, he comes from a family of small agriculturists, from a place called Fazenda Souza, which today belongs to the city of Caxias do Sul/RS. Regarding his father, Balduíno says he loved his land and did not want to leave it, but, “with the advance of urbanization in Caxias, the farm had to yield to the real estate constructions. And my father worked for eighteen years as nocturnal patrol of the Abramo Eberle Metallurgy” (2015, p.56). This story broadens the reflection, comparing the life of his family with the difficult conditions faced by the small agriculturists, who, in the past and the present, end up abandoning the field.

When meditating on his familiar memories, it is possible to perceive how much these experiences produced resonances in Balduíno's future choices, over all in the study subjects that mobilize him. In his words, “my commitment with popular education, with the popular classes, with the social movements, also comes from my origins” (interview, 2012). In his personal archive, although the documents are dated from the teaching period at UFRGS, these signals from the past layers of time to the period in the University are perceivable through the expressive number of papers that represent his involvement with the pointed themes.

Source: Paulo Freire Study Group - GEPF Faccat¹⁰.

Photo 3 Professor Balduíno Andreola 

In the interview that he granted, Balduíno explained his educational background. He was a religious priest during fifteen years, linked to the São José de Murialdo Congregation. He graduated in Philosophy and Theology. When he left the religious life, he decided for the continuity of his academic education. Thus, he attended the Masters' Course in Education in the Graduate Program in Education/UFRGS, in 1975; he was one of the first students of the Program.

Balduíno, in 1978, applied to a teaching position at the Faculty of Education/UFRGS, in the area of Philosophy of Education, and, in this place, he still remains active, even though it has been many years since his retirement. At the beginning of the 1980s, he took a sabbatical to pursue a Doctoral degree at the Catholic University of Louvain, in Belgium. He defended his Doctoral Thesis in 1985, which is about a research that relates the works of Paulo Freire and Emmanuel Mounier. On his career at the Faculty of Education, it is relevant to say that he worked as a director between 1988 and 1992. He retired in 1996, however, he remained working at UFRGS as collaborating professor at the Postgraduate Program in Education until 2003. It is important to consider Balduíno as an important individual in UFRGS' memories, always celebrated when people come to the Faculty. Wherever he goes, “Baldô” radiates goodwill. In this regard, his personal archive is pervaded by affection and sensibilities.

The delicacies of this personal archive

The documentary set of professor Balduíno is understood within the perception of the implied subjectivities, therefore, one of the ways of scrutinizing it is in the intersection of its delicacies. The intention is to find the “poetics of the archive” (Albuquerque Jr, p. 67), considering it a “stronghold of sensibilities” (Cunha, 2019). There was an attempt to scrutinize the clues, to locate symbolic values, susceptible to identification in the documentation.

^{Pesavento (2007}) defines the research that operates with the concept of sensibilities as something that is similar to the “reading of the soul”. It is by means of the filed personal experiences that “cultural practices of the sensible” reverberate (p. 15). The author explains how difficult it can be to capture such evidences “since they develop under the sign of otherness, translating emotions, feelings and values that may not be ours” (p. 15), that is, as historians, it is important to re-educate the look for better approaching the past, in the intention to confront it.

In this perspective of estrangement, when reading notes and cards that the professor preserved, it is possible to perceive how much our daily practices of communication, inside and outside the institutions, were changed, within little more than thirty years. Why did Balduíno keep these simple papers that have memories of the teaching conviviality in the Faculty? Would this be a common habit between professors? Would this bea way of being able to revisit an important time of his career? As a possible reply, it is possible to see in the conservation of these records the constitution of a sensible experience, in which the holder of the personal archive expresses his affections, by means of his keepsakes.

Source: Archive of the Faculty of Education/UFRGS.

Photo 4 Notes kept by Balduíno Andreola 

And specifically on notes, what can be said on the almost insignificance of these ephemeral, little explored devices by historiography? It is a discursive genre that belongs to the modalities of epistolary writing. As well as the letters, they are sent to shorten distances, they supply tracks to understand who wrote them, who received them and the context in which they had been produced (^{Bastos, Cunha, Mignot, 2003}). And for not having been discarded, they allow to esteem the dimension they occupy in the memory of their sender/addressee. The notes hold protocols and gestures that are common to letters, they respect writing conventions, as language of courtesy, greetings and closings. However, for being quick kinds of communication, they correspond to brief messages, which are reduced to the essential, sent in the heat of the hour, without bigger concerns with care, both in the form as in the content, thus the writing material that is more at hand is used.

The writing of notes is a long-time cultural practice. Its circulation, similar to the one of the letters, is related to the development of the access to written culture in the urban life, and this dates back a few centuries. In contemporary times, it is manifested in the fleeting use of screens of mobile devices, but, in the years during which Balduíno was at the Faculty of Education, it had other formats. These small pieces of paper were stored by him in plastic bags, great part of it is very difficult to decipher. Many of them are related to the period in which he was the Director of Faced, several were written by the vice-director, Aldanei Areais. But he also conserved the ones sent by different colleagues, which address various topics.

In these messages that Aldanei sent to Balduíno, it is possible to observe a concern in producing objective records, probably aiming to inform the Director on the topics discussed. The notes sign off with a hug, the date and time they were sent. Many had been written at night. Sometimes, she enumerates the subjects, ordering them. However, perhaps for the proximity with the addressee, she does not write them in a formal way and reveals her feelings. In one of them, Aldanei only writes “Hooray, Uncle Baldô!” (04/08/89), in another, she alerts, “Baldô, you still haven't written the year-end message! Gee, Baldô! Where is your inspiration? We have until Friday to send it, 12/16, 18:30”. Apparently, he fulfilled the task, because he kept the message “End of year FACED”, which includes the poem “Where is the Christmas star?”; an answer would probably be expected by the community.

One of these common notes draws attention: the one written by the Director's assistant, Emilio Millan Neto, “Reminder, from: Emilio to Baldô”, in an ironic tone he says, “I always suspected that you had interest in privatization, now it was confirmed, even a course 'the guys' will offer you”. Attached to the note is the schedule of the event “How to participate in the privatization of state-owned companies?”, addressed to the Director of the Faculty. It is a correspondence that was typical in the 1990s, difficult times for Brazilian public universities, in which the neoliberal discourse defended privatizations, emerging with force both in a state and in a national level. The political certainties of Balduíno, as we know, did not meet this proposal, therefore the irony of the sender of the text.

It is relevant to highlight some more of these writings that were sent to Balduíno by professors, when he was the Director of the Faculty. In one of them, a professor says, “Baldô, how was the trip? Thank you for your persistence in my process…”. These words show a gesture of acknowledgement for the help of the Director in the bureaucratic matters of her life as a public employee. In another one, there is the notice of the birth of the son of a professor, “she had a little boy (you already complimented her at the last graduation ceremony, do you remember?). Now, you asked me to remind you to buy a small gift. Honestly, I believe that she would appreciate a card with your words, because she is sensible to these simple and sincere gestures”. In this note, it is possible to perceive the kindness of Balduíno, his care of the colleagues, which is expressed in the concern not to forget the professor who had just had a baby. Specifically, he asked for the help of his colleague Beatriz Fischer. It is possible that he had the habit of asking the help of many people so they would send reminders to him of these daily, human situations, which can be easily forgotten before many working demands.

Still in the search for evidences of the sensible in correspondences, one sees that the holder of the examined personal archive kept some letters sent by the colleague/friend Nilton Fischer. These two professors had strengthened bonds, since their admission into the PPGEDU/UFRGS Masters' degree, nourished by the common political and epistemological positions. Between the 1980s and the beginning of the 2000s, they worked as advisors in the Line of Research “Education and Popular Classes”¹³.

Thus, in the handwritten text, with a letterhead from ANPED¹⁴, Nilton writes “My friend Baldô” and informs about a Meeting with leaderships of the Workers' Party (1991). In a message sent by Nilton, the central personage is the currently federal deputy Maria do Rosário, former student at the Faced Pedagogy undergraduate course. The text says “Balduíno, Maria do Rosário is our student, she was elected councilwoman and we did not publish any acknowledgement note. Perhaps now, we may be able to correct the mistake, taking the opportunity, don't you think a greeting card would be nice?” With the letter, there is a printed sheet from the Communist Party of Brazil (PCdoB), indicating the election of the councilwoman, in 1992. The note of the professor makes clear the importance of the Faculty, institutionally, valuing the conquests of its students, especially considering that the then newly-elect councilwoman shared political convictions with Balduíno and Nilton. Perhaps that is the reason of the concern of the latter in repairing Faced's omission.

By means of longer written letters, Nilton Fischer writes Balduíno to discuss matters related to the Faculty and the Postgraduate Program, referring to the addressee with the expression “Friend Balduíno” or “Fraternal friend Balduíno”. In the correspondence of 01/27/1984, the sender presents a series of guidelines, because his colleague would occupy his place in the temporary coordination of the Postgraduate Program. Balduíno seems to have intently read it, since he made notes in the text, circulated some guidelines, such as the ones related to security, cleanness, landscaping of the patio. It is a precious document to understand how the management of the PPGEDU in the 1980s worked. In another letter, in the beginning of 1988, written in the computer or perhaps through an electric machine, Nilton calls the attention to the conviviality of both since the Masters' course, and Paulo Freire was the great reference that brought them together. He greets the election of Balduíno for the Direction of the Faculty and asks about his availability to keep working as professor in the Program, stimulating him to remain in this position.

Covering tracks of delicacy in the personal archive, it is possible to observe that the Christmas events seem to have been significant moments for the professor, due to the number of keepsakes allusive to these celebrations. Of these “Christmas parties”, Balduíno kept cards that he received from the colleagues and copies of the itineraries of the celebrations, which were led by him when he was the Director of the institution. Would these events be a practice accomplished in his management period? Would they be related with his life story, as an inheritance of the time when he was a religious priest? Which are the meanings of promoting Christmas parties in a secular institution? When were these activities abandoned, considering that today they do not exist anymore?

On these events, a poem written by the professor, “Christmas”, referring to 1989's Christmas and addressed to the Faced community was found. In verses, the religious discourse is mixed with the adhesion to the political discourse, when bringing messages from the past to the present, thus, the story of the birth of Jesus merges with stories of many children in a state of neglect in Brazil. The Christmas message, addressed to the employees and students of the Faculty, assumes the tone of denunciation, in which, according to the author, today “there are other small Jesuses, without bread, without affection”, located in peripheral regions of Porto Alegre, and in many other cities, which symbolize the history of the birth of Jesus. On the one hand, there is the permanence of the Christian religious thought; on the other, the engagement in social causes, the commitment with the agenda of popular education. These elements mingle in the construction of the poem.

Still regarding the Christmas cards, Balduíno kept two of them which had been sent by the College of Application to the Faculty, one from 1989 and another one from 1992. The first one brings a drawing of a student of the School in the first page; in the message the following excerpt is highlighted: “we believe that the competence and the human sense that emanate from ‘above’ our building will unite with our ‘good spirit’, and positivity will shine every day, turning our energy into source of good life”, signs the Director Jorge Barreto. It is quite possible that this exchange of cards between the Directors of the Faculty and of the School was a protocol of civilities; however, one observes an acknowledgment of Director Balduíno that seems to go beyond the usual words used because of duties owed. In the first card, the “competence and human sense that emanates from above the building” is highlighted. Well, the director’sroom is in the ninth and top floor of the blue building, the place in which Balduíno Andreola worked. In the second card, there is the acknowledgment of the affection and ethical conduct of the Director in the issues that involved the School. It is possible to think that Balduíno, as Director of Faced, endeavored to constructing an environment of harmony before the tense relations that historically involved two distinct institutions that were in the same verticalized space.

Following the “Christmas” subject, another note from the colleague Beatriz Fischer was identified, along with a text intitled “My Christmas”, by professor Maria Bernadette Rodrigues. At the end, Beatriz wrote “Baldô, Aldanei and Emilio: Merry Christmas! Ivany and I found this text by Bernadette and we thought it should be publicized among us. Come to the corridor of the eighth floor and see the other texts written by the colleagues. It is worth reading!" Then, what is perceived is that there was a movement of the professors of the Faculty around the Christmas celebration, which is currently unusual; in these moments, they shared texts written by themselves, a practice that perhaps was stimulated by Balduíno, but that, possibly, was not restricted to a mere institutional activity.

In addition to these memories, Balduíno kept a card from the Landless Movement with the following text, “to occupy, to resist, to produce also in education, in 1992, we hope people can assume together this agenda”, showing his affection for their cause.

And, with regard to the end of his tenure as Director of the Faculty, there are also cards of compliments to his work, which were kept as well. In one of them, the colleague Vera Moraes writes, “it is good working with you!” In addition, he kept a newsletter from December, 1992, referring to a solemnity of transference of the position of Director to professor Maria Isabel Bujes. In this newsletter, there is information on the year-end celebration; such event, which marks the end of Balduíno's tenure, took place at Morro do Sabiá, a place on the shore of the Guaíba River. At the end of the page, it is written, “hoping that everything blossoms in 1993”, a typical way of expressing of the holder of this personal archive. The text presents details of the activity that would be organized; it highlights the promotion of “games, draws, homages”. It asks for the donation of free gifts “that can liven up the activities”; it explains that there will be rides, and even a menu was included: “roasted chicken, ribs, sausage and salads”. Finally, in the intention to stimulate the participation of all employees, it says “the price is very reasonable: some will pay a little more to subsidize it, even exempting others of payment.”

In these keepsakes, he conserved what had a meaning for him. He compiled happy memories in simple, ordinary, unpretentious small papers, which hastily could have been discarded. They were not. They resisted the passing of the years and today they are announced as a “time of delicacies”, referring one more time to the song by Chico Buarque that illuminates these reflections.

Incompletion...

Under history, memory and forgetting. Under memory, the forgetting, the life. But writing life is another history. Incompletion. (^{RICOEUR, 2007}, p. 513).

Without the pretension of writing the life, the contact, the caring for conservation and research in the personal archives of Walter Fernando Piazza (UFSC) and Balduíno Antonio Andreola (UFRGS) evoke, through these sources, ethical imperatives of memory and forgetting. Personal archives create opportunities to reinvent themes and ways handled by transdisciplinary approaches, mobilized by imaginative and theoretical procedures, not rarely heterodox, such as to be aware of subtleties, of small keepsakes. Absurdly human, its uses are so many and so diverse that it becomes difficult to treat them as a whole. No matter how hard one tries to classify, to separate, to arrange, to ask, to doubt, they are powerful as innovative sources of social contemporary science. Innumerable concernsafflict researchers, especially historians; and, certainly, they will not be exhausted in this work, but they will be able to draw other contours to the subject.

To consult materials in varied supports to think on aspects related to these two professors, having written words as tool, was the initial challenge. The enterprise of consulting and writing on these professors, from their personal archives, despite the careful selection of problems to face, brings out many questions, such as, for example: Which documents to select within adocumentary frenzy? Which profits and losses to report? There is the conviction of the fact that there are not definitive answers, but, equally, there is a very human desire to show an enlightening and unpretentious methodological position as a closing. When describing what each professor materialized, it is fundamental not to forget that the lives of people are not only what was registered; that each trajectory is also composed of losses and omissions, of unfulfilled desires, of what was not chosen, of numerous possibilities that mostly have not come true, of the fears that paralyze and even the conscience of what would have been abandoned in the projects, in the actions, in the opportunities.

Mentioning the teaching trajectories, ^{Nóvoa (1992}) postulates that “this profession needs to say and tell about itself: it is a way of understanding it in all its human and scientific complexity” (p. 10). We can say that the studies concerning the teaching profession conserve, in the present time, its place in the field of History of Education. And, in this regard, the immersion in the personal archives of Walter Piazza and Balduíno Andreola allows one to scrutinize their itineraries, the interfaces with the institutions where they worked as professors. Therefore, as spaces of historical research, the two documentary sets conserve autobiographical memories, amid the memories of the universities. Perhaps what makes a greater impression is the fact that the archives in question transcend the existence of these men, by the multiple intersections of individuals and events congregated in their practices of personal filing.

Musealized in safeguard places, the IDCH/UDESC and the Archive of Faced/UFRGS, the personal archives of the professors Walter Fernando Piazza and Balduíno Antonio Andreola await other looks that see them, even more, as sources and as happenings. The time of part of their lives came back here, through the narrative; it is expected to be a signal of the radar of the present time that, sent to the future, may point to the need and the transcendence of other possible readings, since it assumes its place of incompletion.