Stratigraphy of an invisible landscape: museum and archaeological narratives about the Convent of Santa Teresa, Niterói/RJ/Brasil

Abstract

The Convent of Santa Teresa de Itaipu is an eighteenth-century building built to house women at the request or order of their male relatives, as well as those with deviant social behavior, and it is located in the oceanic region of Niterói. Its deactivation, estimated in the second half of the 19th century, was followed by a process of abandonment and deterioration of its structures, which were used as housing by some families of traditional fishermen in the region. Its values ​​as a heritage reference were recognized in 1955, when it was inscribed in the Book of Tombo das Belas Artes of the National Historical and Artistic Heritage Institute. Preserved in ruins, in 1977 it was transformed into a regional museum of IPHAN, the Itaipu Archeology Museum (MAI), initially dedicated to pre-colonial archaeology. Here we aim to reflect on the place of the collected in museum and archaeological narratives that constitute the museum's discourse in the light of Gender Archeology, Landscape Archeology and Museology. From the phenomenologically-based analysis, preliminary results come to suggest that the entity's discourse has not yet appropriated the waves of feminisms fed back by the Museology renovation movements, as it maintains, in the foreground, the narratives related to the pre-colonial past and the past recent, centered on artisanal fishing and on the relationship with the landscape, whose protagonism is in the male gaze and experiences. The meaning of the local landscape was transformed without evidencing the multivocality of that space, where the memories of the incarcerated women remain underground, despite the materiality of the ruins of the old retreat providing a retrospective and materialized memory.