Curating against militarization: the politics of life in Rio de Janeiro’s Museu da Maré

ABSTRACT

Since at least the 1980s, policy, research, and common-sense depictions have associated Rio de Janeiro’s favelas with problems of gang violence, governance vacuum (state absence), and crisis. Within this discourse, favelas are constructed as spaces of exception, whose racialized residents are stripped of legal status and marked by a politics of death. Such imageries also constitute an archive of fear that has discursively-affectively upheld the city’s growing militarization. This article turns to the counter-hegemonic community museum of Maré (Museu da Maré), a complex of 16 favelas in Rio’s North Zone, to demonstrate how it interrupts militarization’s affective-discursive underpinnings. I focus on two facets of this interruption. Firstly, the Museu da Maré embraces a politics of life that suspends the conditions of possibility for a militarized/necrophile knowledge production about favelas that reproduces the idea that favelas are over-determined by the state of exception and a politics of death. Secondly, the museum, in affectively curating how the community experiences fear, breaks with how fear circulates in the city, undoing how it ‘sticks’ to favelas and their residents as the always potential perpetrators of violence. Beyond a project of resistance, I argue that the Museu da Maré foregrounds a politics of the future.

KEYWORDS:

• Museu da Maré
• favelas
• militarization
• affect
• emotion

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Antoine Horenbeek for his wonderful photographs and to the Rio On Watch/CatComm team for all the opportunities and support. I thank my colleagues at the Department of Political Science, the ASPECT PhD programme, and the Community Change Collaborative (CCC) at Virginia Tech for their invaluable comments, with special thanks to Dr Audrey Reeves. Thank you also to the two anonymous reviewers, whose careful feedback has significantly helped shape this article. And obrigada to the Museu da Maré.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.