OCCUPATION CMU

On July 11, 2015, we celebrated the 30th year of the Memory Center-Unicamp (CMU). With a collection of varied typologies, ranging from the late 18th century to the early 21st century, the CMU is being built as a documentation and research center. It acts routinely in the raising of collections, their description, restoration, conservation and preservation; in making the documents available to researchers; in the organization of scientific events and expositions; in the publication of books and journals; in people formation and fostering research. The CMU is configurated as a knowledge-producing archive rather than a closed repository of informations about the past. To celebrate these three decades, we extend our gratitude to the invaluable work of technicians, researchers, teachers and interns of the Unicamp who have or still are exercising their expertise in such meaningful cultural rootings. Thus, may the visitor enjoy the offerings of this OCCUPATION. Maria Elena Bernardes-Director CMU

The CMU was born from the intelectual project of a team of teachers headed by the historiam José Roberto do Amaral Lapa (1929-2000).  According to Lapa, they were alarmed at the “city’s desmemorizing”. The Forum of Campinas’ initiative to discard its notary files stimulated said teachers to push forward the creation of a Memory Center in the Unicamp. Throughout these 30 years, the CMU has firmed itself as a research and documentation center. The public attendance services, the support given to researches in various academic levels, the formation of interns and scholarship holders and the technicians’ actions are among its routine works.

Fernão Dias was a cinematic production filmed in Campinas around 1957. Several documental collections allow us to know about it: the poster, the exhibited film, the movie tickets, the newspaper stories on it, its accounts and the production photographs. The visitor may weave together, as he would do in the archive, the relations between these documents and realize that, within an archive, the documental series often weave historic tapestries.  From his own perspective, the visitor notices that something’s intelligibility, in this case the movie Fernão Dias, interlaces itself with his intellectual and sentient reflection.

Since its beginning in 1985, the CMU has been receiving documents through multiple entering channels – it may be a donation, a purchase or custodial acquisition. The documentation goes through some treatment stages before being made available to the consulter. Belonging to an archive, a document gains a huge power of permanence and usage. If consulted for research, it may reappear in a historical explanation in a thesis, and afterwards in a book, which causes the document to be rewritten and resignified. The places where teachers who have researched in the CMU at different stages of their careers (or still do so) act are signed on Brazil’s map. This shows the capability of professional irradiation thoughout the country starting from Unicamp. 

THE OCCUPATION also celebrates the act of seeing and being in Campinas. Happier, better days of urban life are not longingly evoked. The exhibited photographs belong to various moments of the 20th century and show rundown areas, constructions sites, places both embellished or in blatant transformation process, meaning that these are all dynamics of 20th century’s Campinas. This photographic cluster demonstrates that the CMU’s collection may bring to light a sometimes concealed or forgotten historical dimension of the city.

“The matter of the archive is not a matter of the past. It is not about a past that would be at our disposal. It is a matter of the future, a matter of the future in itself, the matter of the reception, the promise and the responsibility for the future”.

Jacques Derrida