Favelas.br in Maré

The Museu do Maré is a community museum located in one of the most populous favela complexes in Brazil with over 130,000 residents. The Museum holds irreplicable 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. These documents include an extensive collection of community newspapers, photographs of the neighborhood, audiovisual material from a participatory local community TV station, and paraphernalia associated with the Black, lesbian congresswoman and Maré resident Marielle Franco, whose 2018 assassination by local militias sparked international outcry.

In conjunction with Favelas.br, a transnational network of favela archives, academics, and community activists, this project will engage local residents in creating an inventory, organizing museum collections, and purchasing equipment in preparation for their full-scale digitization in the near future. This inventory will facilitate preservation of collections invaluable to the study of cities, Afro-Brazilian history, and social activism in favelas – a historically important kind of informal urban neighborhood common in Brazilian cities and with cognates in cities throughout South America.