Micronarrativas de memórias e a virtualização da experiência de passado na cidade de Juiz de Fora

Abstract

The cities are not just a tangle of urban spaces. They are a living and constantly changing organism. Urban spaces and rites arise, change or are destroyed over time. But what remains of these traces in our memory? Cities, but mainly urban spaces and rites, inhabit our memories, as we all appropriate the dynamics of spaces and our narratives about them follow. And this memory, like the vestiges of the past, is full of intangible elements and concerns a city more imagined than lived. Furthermore, this appropriation of urban space is temporal and is constantly changing. To understand the dynamics of this appropriation, we analyzed narratives about urban spaces in the city of Juiz de Fora. We propose to look at this Juiz de Fora imagined from four paths: in the first path we analyze the comments on the photos on the fanpage “Maria do Resguardo” (MR), dedicated to old photographs of Juiz de Fora. It is a digital album with images and texts about the city on the social network Facebook, making use of memory and time, in what we are calling a memory platform. The second way we point to a time without new information technologies and social networks. We analyzed the narratives of memory about Juiz de Fora from excerpts in works by memorialists who focused on the urban spaces and rites of the city. From the micronarratives present in the works of José Rangel, Pedro Nava, Murilo Mendes and Rachel Jardim, we unveiled Juiz de Fora from the end of the 19th century and until the 40's of the 20th century, with memories of a city that no longer exists. In the third way, we chose to analyze the narratives in a later period, based on thematic interviews with elderly residents of the city. The memories about the spaces and the appropriation of these spaces by these elderly people present us with an imagined city, whose dynamics changes all the time. The last path returns to the first, as we search the social networks for the micronarratives present in the comments of the “Tribuna de Minas” page on Facebook. From the analysis of public comments in the campaign called “Memories Affective”, carried out by the newspaper in May 2019 on the occasion of the city's anniversary, we understand the ruins and the overflow of memory in the media. These traces, remains and ruins of the city virtually resist, through the MR fanpage and the “Tribuna de Minas” booklet. Worked by the fans' memory, the memory that appears in these mechanisms constitutes a qualified temporality. The pages thus systematize the passage of time that they try to subvert, by (re) presenting the vestiges of a survival that demands (or needs) to be named. The remembering subjects (fans who comment on the publications) are species of artisans of the historical moment, who sew other layers of memories of the city in their micronarratives and give visibility to the temporalities of Juiz de Fora. They reveal particular temporal perceptions in a memorialist perspective with a treatment given to issues related to the city's history as an ephemeris. The texts come close to testimonial narratives in affective exchanges in the nostalgic and nostalgic feeling blocks.