The Kaingang, Guarani Nhandewa and Terena collections - Documentary journey, requalification and collaborative process

ABSTRACT

The article deals with a study of curatorship of Kaingang, Guarani Nhandewa and Terena collections in São Paulo, with the purpose of informing these groups about what museums - Paulista and Archeology and Ethnology - have done for more than a century (in the case of Kaingang objects) or seven decades (Kaingang, Guarani Nhandewa and Terena collections). In order to trace the trajectories of these objects and collections, the strategy was to resort to Revista do Museu Paulista, old inventories and other documents, to follow the documentary and physical path of the objects by group. Then, with the curatorship of the indigenous people, new interpretations of the objects are incorporated, contrasting with the documentary process (ethnographic representation) and indigenous self-representation. Therefore, we aim to record the entries and exchanges at a given time, but also to reveal how the documentation and its languages have been changing or incorporating other informations, with its necessary implications, until reaching the objects. The backdrop is the decolonial scene sustained in collaboration processes with indigenous people, which led the research to understand the successive institutional actions, but mainly, to find the objects and make them available to the indigenous people with the possible information and materialities preserved, to be appropriated by groups.

KEYWORDS:
Curatorship; Collections management; Collection requalification; Collections Kaingang; Guarani Nhandewa and Terena/SP