"Opening the chest of memories": cultural policies in Brazil

Starting from a critical view of cultural policies implemented in contemporary Brazil, the author introduces the reader to one of the different ways in which identities are constructed: the appropriation of urban territory through places of memory, a memory that is constantly reworked by individuals who resignify her at all times, using the physical landmarks of her experience in the city for this. São Paulo, the oversized city, moved without stopping by the pressures of capital, is the scenario in which opens the rich chest of memories that Cláudia searches with her text, pursuing the understanding of the multifaceted relationship that is built, thus, between memory and history in the contemporary world. The field in which this search takes place is that defined by the cultural universe in which the public authorities operate in the city of São Paulo, a universe that could be considered restricted but which, thanks to the very characteristics of the city that houses it, ends up showing itself as the repository of multiple identities, overlapping and interrelated, (re) constructed and (re) negotiated at every moment by those who experience them. Thus, in the section proposed in her book, Cláudia Cury focuses on a special model of materialization of São Paulo's urban memory that serves as the basis for these many identities: the so-called "street museums", in their two versions implemented in São Paulo, at two very different moments from a social and political point of view.