"Ibram as a federal autarchy was a consensus in the area and its extinction was not made after consultation or serious preliminary studies". PHOTO: Tânia Rêgo/Agência Brasil

Everything leads us to believe that the current Provisional Measure no. 850 that extinguished the Brazilian Institute of Museums (Ibram), made public last Monday, September 10th, was not conceived after the criminal destruction of the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro, on the 2nd, but much earlier.

The Ministry of Culture website announced, on August 31, on the Friday before the fire that shocked the whole world, the departure of Ibram president Marcelo Mattos Araújo, with one of those compliments that certainly mask disagreements, as you can see. in the quotation marks of Sérgio Sá Leitão, the Minister of Culture, for whom “the Ministry of Culture loses a lot with the departure of Araújo, who 'demonstrated the most absolute competence in the management of museological public policy and Brazilian federal museums'”.

Would it be a shut up? The silence of the former director of the Pinacoteca do Estado amplifies this mystery.

By an irony of fate, Araújo did not have his exoneration published before the fire and had to take care of the work around the catastrophe in the following days as a formal matter. Until on the 10th, when Ibram became extinct, he was free to remain outside the Temer government, a controversial option in the eyes of many of his close friends.

However, his departure a few months after the end of the government can only have one reason in fact, the disagreement with the extinction of Ibram, after all, if it were to disagree with the government, the best moment would have been together with Marcelo Calero, in November 2016 , when he boldly denounced the then Minister of the Government Secretariat, Geddel Vieira Lima, who would also end up falling a week later.

“Ibram as a federal autarchy was a consensus in the area and its extinction was not made after consultation or serious preliminary studies”. PHOTO: Tânia Rêgo/Agência Brasil

The creation of Ibram was a milestone in the history of Brazilian museums, which had never had an independent body to deal with this topic. Until 2009, another federal agency, Iphan, took care of federal museums, but without a national policy, as happened with Ibram. Since then, studies, meetings, public notices have become frequent in the scenario of Brazilian museums, providing initiatives such as museum weeks, or unprecedented joint reflections among the dozens of museums in the country.

One of Ibram's important initiatives to identify museological activity in the country was the National Register of Museums, which mapped more than 3.700 institutions across the country and published, based on the information collected, two relevant publications: Museums in Numbers e Guide to Brazilian Museums.

It is all this articulation that was extinguished, and it is not by chance the resistance to the creation of Abram, the Brazilian Museum Agency, among professionals in the area. In social networks it is clear how the loss shocked and took the country's museums unexpectedly. Ibram as a federal autarchy was a consensus in the area and its extinction was not made after consultation or serious preliminary studies.

What is being proposed instead, the Brazilian Museum Agency (Abram) will be responsible only for the 23 federal museums, leaving hundreds of other museums in the country no longer covered by the new measure.

The controversy surrounding the funds for this agency, part of which would come from Sebrae, has even reached the Federal Supreme Court (STF) with a writ of mandamus asking that the provisional measure that created Abram be suspended, as Sebrae questions the use of part of its resources for the creation of the agency.

It becomes clear, therefore, that this is a hasty, irresponsible act, and that it can only have been motivated as another act of dismantling the cultural sector. One cannot forget that one of the first measures was the attempt to extinguish the Ministry of Culture. The end of Ibram is certainly part of the attack and the lack of respect from a government with no intention of really valuing culture. The National Museum fire will remain the best example of the Temer government's cultural policy.

 

 

 


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