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In January 2025, MEAP Grantee, Alexandre Fortes, led a workshop titled "Peripheral Archiving Workshop - Theory and Practice" at the Museu do Maré in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Dr. Fortes shared insights learned from leading the MEAP funded project, Digitization of the Diocesan Curia of Nova Iguaçu's Archive(opens in a new tab). The workshop, focusing on community archives, workflows, and metadata standards, helped to kick off a newer MEAP funded project, Favelas.br in Maré(opens in a new tab).
This Planning Grant is designed to document the collection held at Museu do Maré, a community museum located in one of the most populous favela complexes in Brazil with over 130,000 residents. The Museum holds collections documenting life and social struggle in a historically working-class, Afro-Brazilian region of the city over the course of more than half a century, from 1950 to the present.
Fortes' workshop highlighted the unique value of archives held at institutions like Museu do Maré, noting that archives of social movements are necessary "to challenge dominant historical and political narratives and the exclusions and falsifications they contain.” The workshop also addressed process details, noting the importance of collection and item description, metadata standardization, and systematizing protocols and methodologies.
