The narrative of the City Museum: Brasília inscribed on stone

Abstract

The Three Powers Square, in Brasília, houses the City Museum, a building that is listed monument both locally and nationally. The monument-museum was designed by Oscar Niemeyer in 1958 and inaugurated in 1960 with the purpose of being a Place of Memory. Its collection is composed of cuneiform texts that present a narrative about the process that originated the city and the persons who made it viable. In visiting the museum, one accesses a narrative that influences the evaluation of one's own experience as an individual and participant of the society. Thus, this record of the past also contributes to the construction of an individual and collective memory. In order to evaluating the museum's collection - which is inseparable from its architecture - the article is structured in three parts: rescuing the trajectory of the building´s design, reflecting on concepts of narratives and, finally, reading and analyzing the texts recorded on the walls. The Museum's panels favor the identification of President Juscelino Kubitschek as the main person responsible for changing the Capital and the insertion of Brasília in a long chronology that presents its construction as resulting from a yearning of the nation.