Museu Casa de Rui Barbosa: entre o público e o privado

Abstract

Acquired by the Brazilian federal government in 1924; transformed into Museu Ruy Barbosa (Ruy Barbosa Museum) in 1927; renamed to Casa Ruy Barbosa (Ruy Barbosa House) in 1928, during the course; and opened to the public in 1930, the residence where the jurist Ruy Barbosa lived his last 28 years is part of the house-museum’s universe. This conceptual model so far uncommon in Brazil, has as conceptual premise the intrinsic relationship between the content and the continent, where the space and the character establish a symbiosis. The house, from the death of its owner, becomes the symbol of his earthly journey enabling reframe the Ruy Barbosa’s history and its historical and social context, in the individual perspective, considering being a personalistic museum. There are however, in this change, a conflict between two spheres: the public and the private. I therefore propose the hypothesis that the government invested in this institution to mystify the public man’s figure, though the fact of space had set to narrate this trajectory be your residence, place of intimacy and family privacy, turns out to humanize the myth. This process, moreover, occurred subliminally despite the institutional effort undertaken, primarily in the first decades of its existence. The overlap of the private sphere is a social demand and an appropriation of the character from different perspectives.This research aims to understand the process of (re)signification that permeates the conversion of a house into a museum and examine the historical and social factors that culminated in the musealization of Rui Barbosa's character. In this process identified also some layers of interests involved including a depoliticization through privatization of the public sphere as one of the strategies.