Reframing Difficult Heritage in Brazil

Dr. Carla Guimarães Hermann

Public space in Brazil is inhabited by the perceptible marks of coloniality, the legacy of the transatlantic enslavement of Africans and the annihilation and deterritorialization of Indigenous Peoples, and more recently, by the remnants of a civil-military dictatorship that ended slightly less than forty years ago.

Historic monuments and statues should not be understood simply as relics of the past. Monuments give visible form to ideas from the past, which are hence allowed to persist in the present. In recent decades, the realization that monuments can represent values that have meanwhile become unacceptable, along with efforts to decolonize public space, have made statues, squares and buildings the focus of political and aesthetic disputes. In a country scarred by its colonialist past, this topic retains its urgency today.

The subproject investigates the ways in which memory is embodied in difficult heritage, at the same time examining interventions into existing patrimonies. With topics ranging from artistic performances involving historical monuments to landscape design and the erection of new forms of commemoration, the subproject strives to formulate a critical approach to discourses of patrimonialization and the aesthetic values it engenders. The spatial concepts of difficult heritage in Brazil are of particular interest. The first case study examines the memorialization process of the Valongo Wharf Archaeological Site in Rio de Janeiro, excavated in 2011 and inscribed in the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2017. The project researches the changes introduced by urban design measures over a period of two centuries, which have resulted in the monument’s current form, along with the aesthetic consequences of these interventions.