The Common and the City: an experiment in horizontal, collaborative curatorial

practices
Ren Lommez Gomes
Carolina Vaz de Carvalho

Reflections on the social functions of museums in developing societies have

greatly influenced museological practices in Latin America at least since the
declarations of Santiago de Chile (1972) and Quebec (1984). Even those institutions
which do not conform to the new typologies of museums that gained visibility in the
1970s and 1980s - ecomuseums, community museums and other forms of active
museology - have had, to some extent, to deal with issues regarding their social
relevance and how to engage community, with their political and social claims, in their
activities.
These concerns were at the core of the motivations for the event The Common
and the City that took place between July 3rd and August 17th, 2014, at the Espao do
Conhecimento UFMG museum in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. The event, which comprised
debates, workshops, seminars, video sessions and the exhibition Cartographies of the
Common was proposed by the museum and the research group Indisciplinar, from the
Architecture School of the Federal University of Minas Gerais (EA/UFMG), and
developed, organized and executed with the active participation of academic research
groups, social and environmental movements, artistic collectives, urban occupationers
and other groups that embrace practices towards the common and promote social
autonomy, civil empowerment, independency, freedom and the observance and
extension of legal rights.

The concept of the common, as defined by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri,
encompasses both the common resources of the material world and the results of social
production that are necessary for social interaction and further production, such as
knowledges, languages, codes, information, affects, and so forth. (Hardt; Negri, 2009:
viii) The existence of the common could make possible a democracy of the multitude; at
the same time, the common should not be seen as an object, but a project of the
multitude. The multitude, in its turn, could be conceived as an open and expansive
network in which all differences can be expressed freely and equally (Hardt; Negri,
2004: xiii-xiv).
In consonance with global movements of the multitude, cultural and social
groups which act in the sphere of the common have been making themselves more
present in Belo Horizonte, a large city in the Southeast region of Brazil, particularly
since massive public demonstrations took place nationwide in June 2013. These groups
advocate causes that are diverse and not necessarily convergent, but partake of a
common logic of cultural production, political participation, self-organization and
communal management of resources, based on the principle of horizontality, and
independent of governmental actions.
The event The Common and the City aimed at eliciting aspects of the thoughts
and actions of multitudinal movements in Belo Horizonte, through the gathering of
singular groups in a collective project that questioned authorship and disciplinary
boundaries. Scheduled to take place simultaneously to the FIFA World Cup, it set itself
apart from other events promoted by the touristic circuit and mass media, proposing,
instead, a critical approach to the recent transformations of the urban territory. It
expressed a desire to experiment with new forms of curatorial practices, to deepen
communication channels between academic institutions and society, and to consolidate

networks of cooperation among those interested in the project of the common. The open
participation of a variety of social actors in all decision-making, from the
conceptualization of the event to its execution, represented an opportunity to investigate
new methodologies in the museological field, developing social technology based on
shared knowledge production, and democratic appropriation of cultural heritage and
museal processes.

The resulting event encompassed a myriad of proposals - debates, seminars,

workshops, commented video sessions, and artistic and political external interventions that evolved around the themes of subjectivity, identity, gender, aesthetics, urban
occupations, mobility, accessibility, street culture, street football, common culinary
traditions and experiences, collective practices of knowledge production, technological
activism, biopolitics and biopotency. The whole production process also culminated in
an exhibition, Cartographies of the Common, collaboratively constructed from content
to form.
Cartography was here apprehended not simply as a way of representing and
describing places, but as a method for the production of knowledge. One of the main
features of the exhibition was a module called Atlas of Multitudinary Insurgencies, that
consisted of a reproduction of the city map in large scale on the floor alongside a wall
with a timeline made up of scratches of checked paper and tape measures. These
devices were designed to allow the connection of time and space in the cartographic
investigation of the actions in the sphere of the common in Belo Horizonte from the
year 2007 to 2014. Visitors to the exhibition were invited to make their contributions,
adding to both the map and the timeline their experience and knowledge of movements
of the multitude in the city. As in other modules, the roles of producers and visitors

were put at risk as visitors could actively participate in the construction and
transformation of the exhibition during the time it was running.
In the opening ceremony for ICOM 15th General Conference in 1989, the then
Director-General of UNESCO Frederic Mayor commented on the changing
museological landscape:
The remote, aristocratic, Olympian institution appropriating objects for its own
taxonomic purposes has increasingly - and alarmingly to some - made way for
an entity responsive to its environment, conscious of its organic relationship
with its social setting. (Mayor,1989: 4)
Although this transformation still faces resistance in the local context, initiatives such as
the one here presented show that some museological institutions and professionals are
concerned with the role of museums as an instrument to be appropriated by the public,
by community and by society. Many of the themes and issues featured in The Common
and the City would not ordinarily have space in the official cultural agenda of Belo
Horizonte, albeit strongly present in the actions of independent groups. The event was
an opportunity to strengthen direct dialog with a wider diversity of people who live in
the city and to make the Espao do Conhecimento UFMG more permeable to new ideas
and propositions coming from its environment.

References:
Hardt, M.; Negri, A. (2004). Multitude: war and democracy in the Age of Empire. New
York, The Penguim Press.
Hardt, M.; Negri, A. (2009). Commonwealth. Cambridge, Mass., The Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press.

Mayor, F. 1989. Address on the occasion of the Fifteenth General Conference of the
International Council of Museums (ICOM). The Hague, United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization.
Moutinho, M. 1993. Sobre o conceito de museologia social. Cadernos de Museologia
n.1: 7.