Favela Museum: Fertile ground for social accessibility?

Abstract

The Museu de Favela is located in the hills of Pavão, Pavãozinho and Cantagalo. It is a territorial museum with links to Social Museology, inaugurated in November 2008. It develops various programs, exhibitions, actions and plans aimed at the development of its community, promoting a set of accesses that integrate its residents with different sectors of society. The aim of this work is to investigate the possibility of calling this set of accesses provided by a museum in the area “social accessibility”. To do so, a case study was carried out in order to better understand how these actions work and their impact on the target public. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with active members of the Board of Directors at the time of the research and with the museum's coordinators, complemented by participant observation while volunteering at the institution. Therefore, it is believed that this set of actions, which results in greater community participation in society, guaranteeing the exercise of rights and duties, including the right to enjoy leisure and culture, and which also raises awareness among sectors of society that are unaware of this reality, can be defined as “social accessibility”.

Keywords: Social accessibility; Museu de Favela; Social Museology; Territorial Museum.