Recent Experiences with the Production of Temporary Exhibitions. Practices, Approaches, and Perspectives on the Collective Work at the Museo del Área Fundacional from Mendoza, Argentina

Academic report Intervención ISSN 2448-5934 ENERO-JUNIO 2024 JANUARY-JUNE 2024 OJS Recent Experiences with the Production of Temporary Exhibitions. Practices, Approaches, and Perspectives on the Collective Work at the Museo del Área Fundacional from Mendoza, Argentina Ir a la versión en español Índice / Contents DOI: 10.30763/Intervencion.298.v1n29.77.2024 • YEAR 15, NO. 29: 259-281 Submitted: 17.01.2024 • Accepted: 07.05.2024 • Published: 31.07.2024 María del Carmen Marengo Lorena Puebla Museo del Área Fundacional de Mendoza, Instituto de Arqueología y Etnología, Argentina Universidad Nacional de Cuyo (UnCuyo), Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones orcid: https://orcid.org/0009-0009-8125-9068 Científicas y Técnicas (conicet), Argentina orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2979-6044 Karina Castañar Centro de Investigaciones Ruinas de San Francisco, Área Fundacional de Mendoza, Argentina | orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3509-0363 Translated by Lucienne Marmasse ABSTRACT The present contribution systematizes our working experiences, since 2018, regarding the production and planning of a cycle of temporary exhibitions in the Museo del Área Fundacional (maf, Foundation Area Museum) in Mendoza, Argentina, whose topics had a historical context. From the theoretical-methodological perspective of research-action-creation, we developed three temporary exhibitions, marked by certain definitions surrounding the addressed subjects and the museological proposal. In this sense, new questions, contents, and objectives were posed, such as highlighting social sectors which had been absent from the maf museal narrative, as well as a communication proposal striving to reach a broader public. KEYWORDS museological exhibitions, collective work, exhibitions, museum publics, museological experiences, history 259 CONVOCATORIA 2024 CALL FOR PAPERS 2024 Academic report Intervención ISSN 2448-5934 ENERO-JUNIO 2024 JANUARY-JUNE 2024 OJS Índice / Contents INTRODUCTION he Museo del Área Fundacional (maf) is an institution that depends on the municipality and is located in Pedro del Castillo square (in the Fourth Section of the City of Mendoza, Argentina), which used to be the Plaza Mayor (Main Square) of this city, founded in 1561. It was inaugurated in 1993 following a research process launched by the municipal authority that gave historical, urban, and heritage value to that part of the city. The maf is an archeological site museum that contains architectural remains of the buildings that operated consecutively in this location since the early 17th century and up until the 1980s: the former Colonial Council, the town slaughterhouse (after the 1861 earthquake), and later the municipality fruit and vegetables market (Bárcena & Schávelzon, 1991). The 1861 earthquake completely destroyed the city and represented a watershed in its urban configuration. Mendoza was reconstructed around its current location (towards the southwestern sector), while the old city and its inhabitants suffered a process of marginalization, impoverishment, and neglect. Since 1998, the Centro de Investigaciones Ruinas de San Francisco (cirsf) is charged with studying and rescuing the history of this foundational sector of the city through the work of its team of urban archeologists. This Center and the maf work together to research, conserve, and disseminate the heritage of the city and its inhabitants. The Museum offers its visitors the opportunity to observe how history is recovered in its different stages, linked to the archaeological remains it houses and protects. The musealized heritage comes from its own collections (purchases and donations) as well as from cirsf’s (archaeological collections obtained through the research process), and also materials on loan from institutions and/or individuals for temporary exhibitions. The following text is the outcome of a process of exchanges, searches, and concerns voiced by the authors, who are female researchers, archaeologists, and historians, but also colleagues and friends that share tasks in the Foundation Area. In 2018, we formed a collective with the aim of carrying out temporary exhibitions to highlight social sectors which are absent from the mu seum’s current permanent script in particular, and, in general from, the narrative of history museums in Mendoza. We collectively and consensually held three temporary exhibitions with common denominators, created from a previously agreed theoretical-methodological framework and a gender perspective, whose themes were centered around women and/or children in Argentina and in T Recent Experiences with the Production of Temporary Exhibitions. Practices, Approaches, and Perspectives… CONVOCATORIA 2024 CALL FOR PAPERS 2024 260 Academic report Intervención ISSN 2448-5934 ENERO-JUNIO 2024 JANUARY-JUNE 2024 OJS Índice / Contents Mendoza spanning the last third of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th. It is worth mentioning that the maf does not include an area destined to temporary exhibitions, hence they were displayed in the permanent collection called Paisajes en Pugna, which houses exhibits that address the immediate and long-term effects of the 1861 earthquake, and the ensuing geographic and socio-cultural division between the Old City and the New City of Mendoza (Marengo & Puebla, 2023). These temporary exhibitions were set up in an integral way, in dialogue with the historical contents and museographic guidelines of the collection, and coinciding with the timeline therein. After the exhibits were taken down, they became travelling exhibitions composed of museographic materials that adapt to the characteristics of the spaces where they are sent. A STARTING POINT Our work is sustained by the contribution of different theoretical and methodological frameworks. We began with the link between research-action, understood as a transformation process of social problems (Lewin, 1992). To this we added the Latin American point of view of Fals Borda (1998) on Research-Participative Action, which proposed to overcome the lexicon of academia and reflect on a sentipensante (sensing/thinking) knowledge that serves the interests of exploited groups. At the same time, the research prioritized the collective way in which knowledge is produced (Calderón & López, 2013). Lastly, we examined the work Action Research-Artistic Creation (iaca) carried out by Huertas Barbosa and Vanegas Arias (2018), who propose a research process of creation/training where teachers of different arts hold dialogues of knowledge with the communities they work with. We took the concept of research spiral from the latter authors (Huertas & Vanegas, 2018, p. 41), wherein actors and stages in the process interrelate in a dialogic manner. To highlight the museological aspect, we believe the exhibition process constitutes a creative act, “insofar as it seeks to convey that which is absent based on a few, partial, eleme (...truncated)