In-person lecture
Date: January 31, 2026 (Saturday)
Time: 2 PM
Workload: 4h
Job openings: 200
Location: Auditorium of the Ipiranga Museum
Accessibility: Pounds
Free registration: until 27/1 in this link
The lecture A history of making memories: two collections in dialogue. opens the cycle Meeting with Research in 2026. The event features presentations of Thais Waldman e Alexandre Araujo Bispo and discusses some of the processes of collection formation – accumulation, collecting, and donation – and the interpretative potential of two documentary sets from the Museu Paulista at USP. Based on these, the meeting proposes a critical reflection on topics of academic interest and on the challenges of preserving material culture in a history museum.
The first collection, presented by Thaís Waldman, consists of textbooks on the bandeirantes (Brazilian explorers/pioneers), analyzed within the context of the historical curatorial development of the long-term exhibition. Imagined Pasts. The exhibition's design and three-dimensional narrative will be contextualized through theoretical discussions that link the study of visual representations of Brazil's and São Paulo's past to cultural history and art history, with special attention to the appropriation of these images and narratives by textbooks.
The second set, presented by Alexandre Araujo Bispo, is the personal archive of Nery Rezende (1930–2012), donated to the Museu Paulista in 2020, during the Covid-19 epidemic. A Black woman from the working class who lived and worked in São Paulo, Nery Rezende amassed throughout her life a significant collection of documents that record both her personal trajectory and broader aspects of the ways of living, working, and relating in the city of São Paulo throughout the 20th century. The archive includes printed materials, manuscripts, photographs, and three-dimensional objects related to her life, family, friendships, and work and leisure relationships.
By placing these two collections in dialogue, the encounter highlights how different types of archives – institutional, educational, and personal – broaden the possibilities for interpreting the past, allowing reflection on memory, representation, and history, as well as on the ways in which individual and collective experiences are constructed and preserved.
Thaís Waldman completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Museu Paulista (2019-2023) and is the adjunct curator of the exhibitions Imagined Pasts and A History of Brazil. Alexandre Araujo Bispo, in turn, has been undertaking a postdoctoral fellowship in Visual Arts at the School of Fine Arts of UFRJ since 2024 and was the mediator of the donation of Nery Rezende's personal archive, the subject of his doctoral research in Social Anthropology at USP.
This event is part of the second year of the "Encounter with Research" cycle, an initiative of the Museu Paulista of USP that promotes periodic meetings with the public to share research developed from its collections and to reflect on the role of research in the construction of historical narratives.
