Picking and collecting – From trash to musealia in the trash Museums

Abstract

The new approaches and institutional perspectives in the field of museums, mainly from the 1980s onwards, began to insert material, immaterially and symbolically, increasingly unique memories and stories that act on objects and museum collections, where there is a tendency to no longer assess their “degree of importance”. The expansion of the museum field and the very definition of museum allow the Trash Museums to be conceived as museum spaces and for the remains, excesses and garbage to be (re)signified as museum objects. The incorporation of objects from garbage in some of the collections in the Trash Museums, happens through characters, among them Valdinei Marques, known as “Nei”, Rubens Dalprat, Alfonso Cardoso known as “Panamá”. These “trapeiros”, linked to garbage recycling companies, or garbage systems, collected, selected things and objects that they considered were not garbage, starting to compose collections of the Garbage Museums in the cities of Florianópolis (SC), São José dos Campos (SP) and Campo Magro/Curitiba (PR).