ICOM International Council of Museums - International Institute for ...

HISTORIA Y MUSEOLOGÍA. LOS CAMBIOS DE PARADIGMAMónica Risnicoff de Gorgas - ArgentinaAbstractTalking about Museology and History, leads us to the matter of the scientific status ofthe Social Sciences, of the pre eminence of one among the others and theircomplementarities. This same matter takes us back to the historical role given to themuseums as spaces of representation and construction of memory.History does not escape to the scientistic problem of the Social Sciences neither canby itself give answer to the question about the meanings of social facts and senses ofhuman actions.On a way, the object of study of Museology –the specific relation of man with reality ina context different from the original – is not irrelevant to that complexity for which wemust make use of other disciplines to assign value, understand and discover meaningsand senses.The system of national museums in Latin America seems to have been conceivedunder that syndrome of nation that wants to be a State , so particular of modernEuropean nation states.In a political program of the public space, the new nations adopt languages andsystems of representation similar to the ones of the nations from which they are freed,so as to claim for their right to autonomy and existence.The case of the use of Jesuitical Collections in the Argentine museums, is a goodexample of symbolic appropriation of objects whose meaning makes them particularlysensitive to different ways of representation.There exists a purpose of legitimize the colonial past through the appreciation ofBaroque Art that is being done in museums of Buenos Aires as well as in the otherprovinces. The Jesuitical collections expounding the Hispanic American Baroque putthe Hispanic and Catholic in value, about the middle of the 20 th century , asfundamental standards of our national things.The inclusion of the Jesuitical Guarani Missions in the list of the World Heritage ofUNESCO first, and then, recently the declaration as Cultural Patrimony of the Worldof the Jesuitical Cordobesean Estancias , has taken a particular influence in thechange of the symbolic use done to the Jesuitical collections and to the meaningsattributed to them.The new paradigm of presentation of the Jesuitical patrimony recognizes that theJesuitical phenomenon, because of its complexity, favors diverse readings, accordingto the area of knowledge from which we focus and from the formal position ofeveryone, generates several interpretations.In the research for the design of new museological scripts, more importance is given tothe significant value of objects further on or not so far of their esthetic or artistic value.The exhibitions tend to revalue the economic function and work as the developmentengine, giving importance to the forgotten social actors such as blacks and Indians.This brief analysis of the change of paradigm in the presentation of the Jesuiticalpatrimony in the Argentine museums, tries to demonstrate how museologicaldiscourses have found a story in historical narratives, that abandoning the priority ofevents are immersed in the analysis of cultural and social structures of history.And that, this phenomenon helps readings which open new fields of interpretation,favoring a closer type of relation between the visitor and the museological object.408