Freheater and researcher at the Afro Brasil Museum for around 12 years, the curator, cultural manager and doctoral student in Anthropology Hélio Menezes, 37, took over the artistic direction of the “most Brazilian of museums” – as he puts it –, around five months ago, after being one of the curators of the 35th Bienal de São Paulo (2023), curator of Contemporary Art at Centro Cultural São Paulo (2019-2021) and co-curator of the outstanding exhibition Afro-Atlantic Stories (2018), at MASP and Instituto Tomie Ohtake, among others. Almost two years after the death of Emmanuel Araujo (1940-1922), creator and director of the Afro Brasil Museum since the beginning (which now also bears his name), Menezes arrives at the institution in the year it turns 20, with a series of plans to intensify the connection with production contemporary – both artistic and intellectual – and create more intense and effective channels of dialogue with the public and society.

For Menezes, the Afro Brasil Museum was a great “nursery”, “very capable of generating a generation of professionals”, but was not able to keep it around over time. It created and fostered a field of debate about the richness of Afro-diasporic production, about racism and decolonialism, but it lost some protagonism in the debate. With a vast and extremely rich collection, of around 10 thousand works of art and thousands of books and documents, the museum has already undergone some expographic changes since Menezes joined, but always respecting the legacy and concepts developed by Emanoel. Among them, he “aired out” the space by removing some objects, especially those linked to the more explicit violence of slavery – such as torture pieces, for example. “To literally open space for more narratives, which do not try to subsume Afro-Brazilian or Afro-diasporic history to slavery. It’s not about denying it, but about facing it using strategies that don’t seek to reenact the pain.”

Linked to the São Paulo State Department of Culture, with an annual transfer of R$ 13 million, and visits of 150 thousand people in 2023 (and 100 thousand this year, so far), the museum currently presents, in addition to a small tribute space to Emanoel, four temporary exhibitions: “Between lines: Aurelino dos Santos and Rommulo Vieira Conceição”, “As vidas da Natureza-Morta”, curated by Claudinei Roberto da Silva, “Contemporary artists from Benin”, from the institution’s collection, and “Wagner Celestino: samba paths”.

A arte!brasileiros was at the museum to interview Hélio Menezes, who spoke about these and other topics, including the location of a “disruptive museum” in the middle of one of the richest regions of the city and the plans for the 20th anniversary celebration. Over the course of a year, starting in October, the institution will organize a series of meetings, debates and exhibitions, related to its history. Among them, “The history of power in Africa”, curated by Vanicléia Silva-Santos, and a large exhibition from the museum’s “popular art” collection – also called naive art, raw art or art of the unconscious. “These are expressions that will be debated, because they always add an adjective to the word art, almost as a way of denying it”, he states. The fact is that many exhibitions will recall past shows, which helped to form the museum's collection, while others aim to point out paths for its future.

Finally, when talking about the growing power of black intellectual and artistic production in the country – “you can no longer speak properly about contemporary artistic production if you don’t go through Brazilian production” – Menezes is also not deluded about the role of art , in itself, as a solution to structural problems in society. “This debt, which is social, economic and also cultural, will not be resolved only in the field of art and culture, although this field is fundamental for the elaboration of new visions, of a more critical elaboration based on the senses. ”, he concludes.

Read the full interview below.

ARTE!✱ - Hélio, you took over as director of the Afro Brasil Museum almost five months ago. I wanted to start by asking how the work has been, a little overview. What has already been possible to understand, do and plan?

Hélio Menezes – Maybe it's important to go back in time a little. I started my research on the museum around 12 years ago, mainly based on academic investigations. So, I dedicated my undergraduate, scientific initiation, master's and doctoral years to the museum itself – to the curatorship of Emanoel and the Afro Brasil Museum. My initial research took place mainly based on the exhibitions curated and organized by Emanoel that culminated in the Museu Afro Brasil, 15, 20 years before its opening. He didn't necessarily have this in mind, this predetermined objective that they would create the museum. And researching these exhibitions led me to the conclusion that they built the institution's collection. So, the museum is a kind of gathering of these curatorial experiences and research that preceded them. In other words, somehow, I already knew in depth the stories behind the composition of a large part of this collection.

So this ended up being a facilitating point for me, because it is a very complex museum, whose histories go back decades before its own foundation, to the formation of Emanoel's personal collection, to the institutional formation of the museum. It is a very challenging institution for those who do not know it, due to its size, its complexity, because it addresses a series of themes and artists that did not appear – and many still do not appear – in the main art history manuals, books or courses in the world. Brazil. It is a disruptive museum. His collection is disruptive and, therefore, necessarily demands from the visitor, the interested party, an engagement, including an emotional one, that is more intense, more dense.

And during these five months I focused especially, firstly, on listening to museum employees, from different areas. There were weeks of a lot of listening, reading reports and organizational charts. This allowed me to create a diagnosis of the most urgent challenges and those challenges that need to be addressed over time. And what diagnosis is that? I would say that the museum really needs a series of changes that are of an operational nature, of an internal nature, which concern the creation of workflows, protocols, the redesign of an organizational chart in order to be a more functional museum. There is also a series of research, especially documentation, the history of exhibitions, the history of works, the trajectory of the collection's formation, which needs to be made public, which needs to be available for consultation and to researchers. So, there is a whole dimension that is barely visible to the public that took up a lot of my time and that will certainly take up the next few years.

But there is another dimension that demanded my attention over the first five months, which is yet another work visible to the public, which concerns a remodeling of the long-term exhibition; concerns organizing a curatorial and cultural program for the museum; and also to rethink conceptually. I think this is the biggest challenge: how to conceptually rethink the purpose, the mission of the museum, its collection, its modes of exhibition.

ARTE!✱ – Did you have the recent experience of being one of the curators of the 35th São Paulo Biennial? Of course, a biennale has a specific duration, a specific curatorial focus and big spotlights on it, it is very different from the routine of running a museum, your day to day life. Still, I wanted to know if you think you bring, here to the Museu Afro Brasil, specific lessons learned from what you experienced there, things that can be valuable and useful in your work at the museum?

I would say that not only the Biennale, but my entire previous career somehow paved the way for my arrival here, even if it wasn't in a programmatic way. So it's clear that the Biennale has a different dynamic to the museum routine, but in some sense it's quite similar. The museum is much more challenging, but somehow these two professional experiences come together, to the extent that in a biennale you almost build an entire institution, for three months. You have to think about all aspects. And in the 35th edition we were specifically concerned with this, not just the exhibition stricto sensu, but of the entire educational and public program; of eating, etc., within a curatorial concern. So, in a way, creating a biennial is almost building an institution.

ARTE!✱ – A temporary museum…

Yes, a temporary museum, so to speak. Now, it is clear that the museum requires other specialties for its operation. There is care, for example, in safeguarding, care in conserving works, especially thinking about preventive conservation, in a space like ours, measuring 12 thousand square meters, within a park. I mean, there are other, much more complex responsibilities. But, for example, I think I bring more experience in terms of management in a public sector from the time I spent at Centro Cultural São Paulo, for example, than the Biennale itself.

ARTE!✱ – When you took over the museum, one of the things you said was that you intended to bring a more contemporary look to the programming and the collection. I would like you to talk a little more about this, what would this contemporary look be?

I think that throughout the museum's 20 years it was a kind of nursery, a granary, for the most important art and culture professionals. Especially black art, culture and research professionals had their trajectories marked by the Afro Brasil Museum. Whether as external researchers, in-house researchers, employees, people hired for activities of greater or lesser duration... some of the most important names in curating, research, artists and institution managers of my generation passed through the museum. What catches my attention is that the institution was very capable of generating this generation of professionals, but was not able to keep them. These professionals are now in the most important institutions in Brazil and the world, but almost never here.

So, bringing greater contemporaneity to the museum means bringing these professionals together, who we want to be increasingly involved, but it is also something about the composition of the collection itself. Over the last 20 years, the Afro Brasil Museum has been one of the most important institutions to encourage a debate about decoloniality, about contemporary black production. It was, and continues to be, a museum that exercises decoloniality long before this term was in vogue, but the collection, although it has been nurtured and expanded over these 20 years, presents a gap, especially in this contemporary Brazilian production, by black authors, which Today it is in the most important collections of institutions in the world, but not here.

So bringing more contemporaneity to the museum is about bringing more contemporary thoughts about expography, about curation, about artistic production, about Brazilian historiography. This is also a museum very concerned with history and in these 20 years there has been a flowering of black intellectuality, a significant increase in historiographical research on Brazil, which also needs to be evident in the museum.

ARTE!✱ - About the collection, So is there a focus on acquisitions at the moment?

Yes... at the Afro Brasil Museum, when I talk about collections, I'm talking about three collections that make up our collection as a whole: a museum collection, a documentary collection and a bibliographic collection. So, it is in these three dimensions that contemporaneity must express itself. This certainly involves acquisitions of new works. In other words, through strategies for acquiring new works, a closer dialogue with artists; a greater opening of our library, which is an extraordinary library, but which must once again occupy a place of greater dialogue with authors, with publishers, in other words, a very broad front for expansion and review of the collection. And there is a lot of material that needs to be continually renewed in terms of information, subtitles and technical information. They are both documentary, museological and bibliographical works, which need to be continuously fed with information about their origins of donation, origin of arrival at the museum and so on. Regarding the characteristics of the collection, retracing this history is an ongoing mission of the museum, with an accumulation of 20 years to be done as well.

ARTE!✱ - There is a very interesting quote from you in a recent interview with Veja: “This is the Afro Brasil Museum and not the Slavery Museum. We are looking for strategies to talk about violence without reenacting it. The complaint continues to be part of it, but it is no longer the protagonist.” Does this have to do with the contemporary look you want to focus on? Can you talk a little more…

Yes, all these questions are part of a broader vision about the museum. I think that when I say that in 20 years historiography, curatorial and artistic debates have developed exponentially, many of these reflections, many of these debates are aimed at the Afro Brasil Museum, naturally, demanding of us what to do in the face of new reflections. One of them, of fundamental importance, concerns these images of control, instruments of torture, a series of elements that many museums, especially museums that have a certain concern with black collections or that call themselves black museums, often have their own. collections in significant numbers. I think that, although these objects and images of colonial control, of reenactment of violence, are very present in our daily lives as Brazilians – in large public monuments, right here near the museum, for example; or in coffee shops in the center of São Paulo, it is very common to see reproductions of enslaved people in situations of extreme violence picking coffee – that is, although there is a normalization of this racial violence, it does not seem to me that the museum is a place for the re-enactment of this. I think it's a place to deconstruct the naturalization of racial violence.

And, therefore, when I say that this is not a museum of slavery, I want to say that Afro-Brazilian or Afro-diasporic history, more broadly, does not begin with slavery – it has an entire history that precedes it –, It does not end with the end of slavery nor does it end with it. It is essential that other aspects of black life, that other aspects of Brazilian culture, of Afro-Brazilian aesthetic and artistic production, find space in the museum in addition to a narrative about slavery. The removal from the exhibition space, for example, of some objects of torture, of some objects of racial violence, opens up space for a discussion, for a debate. These objects remain available for consultation, both virtually and in person, for anyone who wants them. But they are currently removed from the permanent exhibition and this was one of the first changes we made in these first months of work on the long-term exhibition. To literally open space for more narratives, which do not try to subsume Afro-Brazilian or Afro-diasporic history to slavery. It's not about denying it, it's about facing it using strategies that don't seek to reenact the pain, but to talk about it.

ARTE!✱ - For some years now, we have been living in a context in which issues linked to identity, decolonial and anti-racist issues have gained great prominence in the world of arts and culture. Whether in debates, research, in the programming of institutions and even in the art market. It is curious to think, however, that in the midst of this, the Afro Brasil Museum – which has been carrying out intense work for 20 years and which has this magnificent collection – does not seem to have had the protagonism it deserved, or could, have. We have already talked about the distancing of people “created” in the museum, for example. But I would like you to talk a little more about the subject. Finally, do you agree with this diagnosis and, if so, what can you do?

That's an intriguing question. There is indeed something paradoxical in this place, which is to understand how the museum was a proponent long before the time of these debates that are now central and unavoidable throughout the world, but did not assume a leading role within them later. And it seems to me that it is only possible to find an answer to this paradox in the way we observe that the museum, for a series of reasons, has not opened up to communication channels more broadly with society. So it seems to me that this paradox can only be faced by increasing this communication with society and with this new historiography, new curatorial thoughts, with these anti-racist and decolonial approaches. Who are the actors? Who are the thinkers? Who are the artists in this field?

When you quote Afro-Atlantic Stories, which I was part of, you reminded me that, months before the opening of this exhibition, I was visiting the museum here and Emanoel Araujo asked: “Hélio, why are you doing this exhibition at MASP and not here?”. And I answered him: “Why am I doing the exhibition at MASP and not here?” I repeated the question as an answer. We laughed and there was no possible answer to be given at that moment. But I think, now, six years later, that it is because of this difficulty that the museum faced for some years in its communication channels precisely with all these actors that it itself helped to promote, which did not place it as a natural protagonist at this moment. . And it is this place of protagonism that we are recovering.

ARTE!✱ - Now, in addition to this communication channel with artists, researchers, curators, etc., I think about the public itself. We know that participation, interaction and educational dimensions in general are increasingly relevant in museums, which have long ceased to be just spaces for enjoyment. In this sense, how can we bring the public closer and bring more people here?

In this aspect, one thing is important to highlight. The Afro Brasil Museum has an extraordinary, very expressive audience. So, even with this paradox that we talked about, it never stopped arousing interest, demand and demand from people. What seems like an objective to me is to increase the variability of this audience and also, of course, bring in more people. We have a very frequent audience, mainly researchers and students, a number of visitors to Ibirapuera Park and a certain foreign audience. This is very interesting, you hear other languages ​​being practiced in this museum daily. Many people come to Brazil and when they are asked which museum they want to visit, it is the Afro Brasil Museum. Because it is the most Brazilian of museums. Now, this audience can be further expanded and, above all, not only as a visitor, but as an interlocutor. So that these people, these dilettantes, visitors, researchers or simply interested in an exhibition or the history of Brazil and Brazilian art, can also communicate with the museum. So it's not just a dimension of expanding the audience, but of qualifying the institution, so that we can listen even more carefully, even more welcoming.

For example, this year marks the 13th anniversary of a program called Singular Plural, which is the museum's accessibility program. In addition to the accessibility dimension being a central point today, the fact that it is a long-lasting program has brought about a huge, significant expansion of an audience with special needs – whether cognitive, physical, motor, or due to age. For me, it is a joy to see the museum expanding the participation of this public. So when I talk about opening communication channels with society, this concerns an expansion of the public, without a doubt, but it also concerns better qualification of the museum's channels to listen to this public, to relate to this public .

ARTE!✱ – Does this also apply to social media?

Yes. This involves the museum's communication, which has to be restructured. It involves the website, social networks, communication that has to be more strategic, but also communication that can better serve the production of knowledge. We are faced with a collection that is so extraordinarily rich, with pieces that, even on display, when highlighted, are illuminated by valuable information. So this also has to be better extroverted. Museums are important spaces for the production of knowledge. This one, being, I repeat, the most Brazilian of museums, with a museum collection of between eight and 10 thousand pieces, but, counting the documentary and bibliographic collections we reach more than 20 thousand works, there is a literal piece of Brazil here. And there is a lot of knowledge production that takes place internally, which needs to be better disseminated, better extroverted.

ARTE!✱ - Now, thinking about the physical space of the museum, it is in a very special place in the city, in a Niemeyer building, in the most important park in São Paulo, but at the same time somewhat removed from the more central urban life – unlike museums like MASP, IMS, Pinacoteca etc. There is no subway station that leaves the park, for example. Furthermore, it is surrounded by extremely elite neighborhoods. How do you deal with this and try to bring in a diverse audience?

This question is excellent, because the location of the museum is already one of its most important works. It is already starting to affect, let's say, it already has effects on the museum in itself. We are talking about a black museum, the Museu Afro Brasil, within a set of neighborhoods where most of the city's wealth is concentrated, and a racialized wealth, which is mainly white wealth. To make a comparison, the neighborhood of Moema, which is adjacent to the museum, has the smallest relative black population among all the neighborhoods in São Paulo. Around 5%. And yet, even so, the museum is a space within this, in quotation marks, noble zone, where black people, the peripheries, find a home, find a place of welcome and expression.

 So the location of the museum in the park does carry a certain ambiguity. On the one hand, it is an extremely noble location, a beautiful park, with a historic building, by a historic architect, on the other hand, there is no public transport or easy access to the park, the bus and metro lines are not sufficient and generate some type of obstacle – also in terms of accessibility this is a difficulty. What we can do and are doing, and this has been happening since before my arrival, is to increase the capacity to talk to managers, both public and private. Today, access to Ibirapuera Park is controlled by a private organization, so the museum negotiates, talks – just like the other museums located in the park –, but today we do not have an autonomous capacity to change these flows in relation to transport, access.

And, in the meantime, we seek to develop strategies, especially cultural programming, educational actions and cultural programs that dialogue with the most diverse desires present in society, including those who do not live in the neighborhoods where the museum is connected. So, I believe that robust, interesting curatorial, educational and cultural programming has positive effects in this sense. And we have reaped results, such as seeing our exhibitions full both at the opening and in subsequent weeks. We opened the exhibition of between the lines with Rommulo Vieira Conceição and Aurelino dos Santos, we opened the exhibition Samba Paths, with photographs by Wagner Celestino, The lives of Still Life, which is an exhibition curated by Claudinei Roberto, and the exhibition of contemporary artists from Benin, which was created from the museum's own collection and we see a significant audience.

ARTE!✱ - The Afro Brasil Museum was renamed the Afro Brasil Emanoel Araujo Museum after Emanoel's death. I wanted to take this opportunity to ask you to talk a little about its importance. In this case, less as an artist, which we already know, but as the creator, curator and manager of this museum, a great promoter of Afro art in the country...

Emanoel is a fundamental figure in the history of Brazilian art, in the history of Brazilian museum institutions, with stints at the Bahia Art Museum and the Pinacoteca – before the creation of the Afro Brasil Museum. I believe, I am sure, that Emanoel's relevance is very well documented and consolidated, whether he is an artist, whether he is responsible for creating a space like this museum or for his management time in other institutions where he also worked. . I think that the Afro Brasil Museum, when it very proudly adopts the name of its founder as part of its name, reinforces this tribute and this relevance of Emanoel on the national and international scene. The only point I would add to this chorus, to which I join, of understanding and respecting Emanoel's fundamental relevance, is that the Afro Brasil Museum is, yes, the result of his personal commitment, which is unquestionable, but I I see him as a kind of captain, so to speak, someone who led a struggle that is also collective and historical. I mean, this museum is the result of a black struggle.

I dedicated myself, for example, to understanding what were the initiatives to institutionalize and create museums of Afro-Brazilian art and, of course, we can go back to the creation of the Black Art Museum, by Abdias Nascimento, in the 50s; we can return to the Afro-Brazilian Museum, in Salvador, whose foundation dates back to the 70s; we can think of museum experiences such as the Laranjeiras Museum, in Sergipe, the Museu do Negro, in Rio de Janeiro... I mean, there are a series of initiatives of different sizes, with different impetus, to museumize black art or history Brazilian from the black perspective. The Afro Brasil Museum is, without a doubt, the greatest achievement of this struggle, but I think it is important to locate the museum in this broad history of black struggles that found in Emanoel this figurehead, this figure capable of concatenating, at a certain historical moment, the creation of a space like this that will be a legacy for all of us.

ARTE!✱ - And 2024 marks the museum’s 20th anniversary. Do you think about holding some kind of celebration, some exhibition… Something to mark the date?

Yes, 20 years are not 20 days... and that is why they ask us to take a moment to reflect on this journey of the institution, but also, in addition, our vision for the future, for the next 20, 40, 200 years of the museum. And, therefore, what we are preparing will not be a one-off celebration, but we will take advantage of the entire year to honor the two decades and, at the same time, point out some directions going forward. So, we are organizing a series of exhibitions, but also seminars and publications that will always deal with this hinge: how to look back to look forward. This includes, for example, a reflection seminar on the museum; the invitation to a series of researchers from the different areas that make up the museum's long-term exhibition, so that we can rethink, together, this re-elaboration, this re-presentation of our own long-term exhibition and so on.

ARTE!✱ - Finally, a slightly more general question, but one that obviously has an impact on what we think and do here at the museum. At the same time that we have this greater emphasis given to the issues we talk about, about decoloniality and anti-racism, there also seems to be an increase in attacks, in Brazil, on aspects of Afro culture, such as religious matrices, for example. There is also a racist extreme right that seems to have come out of the closet and is showing itself to be very powerful. Does this seem paradoxical to you? Or precisely one thing can be a response to another…. How do you see this moment?

I remember we closed the last day of showing Afro-Atlantic Stories on the day of Jair Bolsonaro's election. And for me it was a very curious feeling to visit the last day of the exhibition with a large pro-Bolsonaro demonstration on Avenida Paulista. This situation that you describe, which is, at the same time, a growth in interest and even a more voluminous, more robust production, of greater quality and diversity by black authors, finds, in the same time and space in which we live, a contemporary with a resurgence of racial violence. Or an “unpayable debt”, to use Denise Ferreira da Silva’s terms. I think that this debt, which is social, which is economic and also cultural, will not be resolved only from the field of art and culture, although this field is fundamental for the elaboration of new visions, of a more critical elaboration from of the senses.

Art allows us to resize a series of issues that affect the social world and approach them from another perspective, from another sensitivity. But I think we should demand from public policies what concerns public policies. We must demand greater responsiveness, responsibility, equity and justice from the socio-economic system, and not ask the field of arts to resolve what is beyond its possibility of resolution. And I think it is in this situation that the relevance of the Afro Brasil Museum becomes even more exponential. Its relevance in a context of resurgence of racial violence, in a context of increase – or at least greater discussion and greater visibility – of cases of racism in Brazil and the world, makes the counterpoint that this museum has exercised for 20 years even more important. years.

Now, it doesn't necessarily seem like a contradiction to me that this scenario happens. Because it is no surprise that often times in moments of greatest violence are where we see greater resistance and a demand for greater creativity, for the creation of strategies to face these authoritarian, conservative, racist, classist advances. So, what it seems to me is that there is an artistic movement in Brazil that was even more encouraged in the face of adversity. This is not a compliment to adversity. I think that if with little Brazil is already capable of doing what it does in the production of contemporary art, in order to guide art debates around the world today, if with a little, with restricted funds, with budget restrictions and an unfavorable political scenario, yet Brazil stands as a protagonist – and black Brazil, in particular –, let us imagine what a country that praises its artistic production could become. A country that supports artists and art institutions instead of persecuting, censoring or inhibiting them.

 


Sign up for our newsletter

Read alsoMore from author

Leave a comment

Please write a comment
Please write your name