INTERVENTIONS IN MUSEUMS

ACTIVITY WITH PATRÍCIO PRAZERES AND PASSOS MANUEL SCHOOLS AT THE GEOLOGY MUSEUM OF LISBON

Dates: 8th November 2023 - 8th January 2024
Venue: Geology Museum of Lisbon
R. Academia das Ciências 19 2°, 1200-032 Lisboa
Web : https://www.lneg.pt/museugeologico/

On November 8, 2023 an educational action was organized with a group of 8-year-old children at the Geological Museum of Lisbon, as part of CARIM research project. The action represents an attempt to elaborate together with children an extended vision of how museum can transmit, store and mediate cultural information, objects and immaterial heritage, steping out of an euro-centric tradition of viewing the non-human world.

The action was conducted by the psychologist and museology researcher Roberta Gonçalves, andby Margarida Belchior, professor in education and sociodrama, both based at Universidade Lusofona, Lisbon. Central to the educational action was the projection of the artistic work of the Brazilian contemporary artist Gustavo Caboco of Wapichana ancestry, namely the digital animation:Kanau’Kyba (2021).

The film describes a vision of the mineral and natural and the osmosis between human and non-human dimensions of perception, through the perspective of indigenous knowledge, traditions and cosmogonies. The inter-disciplinary methodology included, in addition to the projection of animation by artist Gustavo Caboco, a collective immersion in a story recorded by Gustavo Caboco himself (with a soundpanel of voice and sound), led by psychologist Roberta Gonçalves (Univ. Lusofona, Department of Museology), followed by the application of an active experimental learning methodology based on sociodrama (led by professor Margarida Belchior (Univ. Lusofona, Ceied).

Children and adults alike physically enacted different hypostasthes of being in the world and collectively rethought concepts such as the museum, stone, the earth and our relation to it – based on the inputs brought by the video-animation by Gustavo Caboco, by sociodrama and immersion. At the same time, the way in which museums hold and transmit natural history, was not only reflected upon, but also extended with a dimension of knowledge and information that repositions our relationship with the animal, spiritual, ancestral, vegetal and mineral world.