A SALA DO VEADO : um projecto experimental de Arte Contemporânea no Museu Nacional de História Natural e da Ciência

Abstract

This research work is centered in the study of the Sala do Veado as an experimental space of contemporary art inserted in the National Museum of Natural History and Science. Throughout twenty-five years in this exhibition room, artistic tendencies were broad and non-limiting, including diverse artists and audiences. From 1990 to 2015, around 240 exhibitions of contemporary art by 300 artists were presented continuously and uninterruptedly in the Sala do Veado. The present research work was carried out with the awareness of the end of the Sala do Veado project, but also with the conviction that the end of the Sala do Veado did not mean the end of the contemporary art in the Museum. The Sala do Veado was a pilot project devised at an international level that had the potential to propagate throughout the Museum and is, presently, moving towards a new intervention phase bringing together art and science. Six interviews were conducted with the directors of six other natural history museums with the intention of investigating the existence of similar projects to the Sala do Veado and, thus, understanding the uniqueness of this project in the international arena and in the current contemporary art and science interconnection in museums of natural history and science, within a context where the tight frontiers of fields of knowledge begin to blur. The considerations that are made throughout the present research are defended the presentation of oral testimonies and printed sources, such as the testimonies of the artists, museum staff, written texts by various art critics, and the compilation and organization of the museum archives regarding the exhibitions. In this thesis, we present the Sala do Veado as an area of contemporary art with an experimental character, a place of reflection and interaction with the public, which questions the linearity of the concepts of history and memory and, furthermore, shakes the epistemological frontiers of fields of knowledge and of human experience. The main idea is contamination, in particular, the contamination that gave rise to a project that transcends conceptual, physical and spatial boundaries in which it had been contained: the Sala do Veado project outside the Sala do Veado