August 16th 2014
PROJECT ATELIER
80th
The Museological Coordination of the 3rd Bahia Biennial
The artist Juarez Paraíso in the process of restauring his works | Photo Alfredo Mascarenhas
Project Atelier, which comprises one of the actions developed by the museological board, shows the necessity of interaction between the modern and contemporary artistic production with research methods, documentation and museological conservation. This is an action in partnership with artists, who gave their collection and workspace (sometimes their residences), their artistic conceptions and, according to their production logic, visions of how this collection must be documented and technically reorganized. The actions of the Project Atelier are geared toward the preservation, investigation and communication of cultural/artistic goods. In order to preserve the object and the possibility of the information that it contains – and what qualifies it as a document – the conservation and documentation are the basis for its transformation into a source of scientific research and communication. Thus, we have developed the Project Atelier from the work of contemporary artists and based on the guidelines of museological documentation. The documentation of museological collections is an essential procedure within a museum, representing the collection of information about the objects through the word (textual documentation) and the image (iconographic documentation). It is, at the same time, an information retrieval system capable of transforming the collections into scientific research sources and/ or knowledge transfer agents, which requires the application of concepts and techniques themselves, aside from a few conventions, aiming for the standardization of content and languages. This way, to formulate a museological inventory, a highly technical procedure, it is of great importance to conduct thorough research; the inventory is the first source of information on the object which the researcher of cultural material should resort to. The team had to apply methods of museum documentation, used for the cataloguing and conservation of established museum collections, to organize new collections of contemporary artists. They are artists with varied production techniques and that are still creatively active, so there was also the need for the readjustment of some items in the inventory in order to meet the needs of each atelier and collection worked on. The activities were accompanied by the artists participating in the action, so it was possible to discuss and develop functional action strategies that would be continued by the artist afterwards.
The project included technical evaluations, digitalized cataloguing of the collection (execution of inventory/listing the works), cleaning of the collection and a proposal for the organization of them. The actions were initiated as technical visits so that the artist and museology technicians could interact in order to know and think about the form of organization and documentary registration of the works. Then the works were photographed, measured, analyzed judiciously (observing their conservation status) and cleaned1. This information will appear in the scanned inventory. The works are organized spatially by technique, typology and support (framed or not). The construction process of the inventory model followed the plan already used by the staff of the Museum of Modern Art of Bahia; some items were removed – because of the need to conduct an inventory in a short time and for the easy access and understanding of a non-technical audience – and others added, obeying the peculiarities of the collection. The photographs were inserted on the worksheet to facilitate the visual identification of the works2. In addition to the inventories, reports were produced, with the goal of registering the activities developed in the actions, which includes information on the cataloging, cleaning and packaging processes, and the transport of the works that participated in the Biennale exhibitions. This includes, in addition to the period covered by the action, information about the technicians involved, methodology adopted and the reporting of the actions. Thus, it is possible to observe that Project Atelier is an action that counts on the technical support of the museological team in partnership with the artists involved, in order to make the collection produced – and still in production – organized and accessible to a variety of audiences who wish to know and find out about the rich productions of contemporary art present in the 3rd Bahia Biennial.
1
Mechanical cleaning process with brushes
The photographs are nested in the archive and are displayed when you pass the cursor over the red label present in the cells
2
Session of the film Uma Longa Viagem (Lúcia Murat) at the cineclube Tela em Transe, in Poções, for Cinema Yemanjá. Photo Reproduction
The Drawing workshop has its second itinerant action, this time in the Nautical Museum, at Barra lighthouse.
Evandro Sybine holds one more meeting of the Research Group in Metal Engraving. Photo Rafael Martins
Photo Rafael Martins