Author: Leandro Vacaro

Abstract:

This research seeks to understand the communicative potential of an object belonging to the collection of the Museum of Hip Hop Culture of Rio Grande do Sul (MUCHRS), the cover of the album of the musical group RAP L.O.R.D.S., entitled “Homem Errado”. The art and texts on this cover narrate, from the perception of the members of the group, the events that involved the murder of Júlio Cesar de Melo Pinto, a black man who was mistaken for the robbers who invaded a supermarket in the East Zone of Porto Alegre in 1987, by agents of the Military Brigade. The research focused on the methodology of bibliographic and documentary analysis and semi-structured interviews with a MUCHRS professional, with the victim’s widow and with a member of the group L.O.R.D.S at the time of the release of the album, proposing a resignification of the object (which is currently part of the long-term exhibition of MUCHRS, on the origins of the Hip Hop Movement of Rio Grande do Sul), that enables the communication to the institution’s attendees and the community in general, of this exemplary episode of racism and police violence against the black and peripheral population of the city of Porto Alegre. For the theoretical basis, we sought to interconnect the following concepts: generating object (Ramos, 2020), object-becoming (Brulon, 2014), musealization (Desvallés; Mairesse, 2010 and Loureiro; Loureiro, 2013), collective memory (Pollak, 1989, Gondar, 2016 and Tolentino, 2018) and structural racism (Moore, 2007, Campos, 2016 and Almeida, 2019). The investigation highlighted the communicative, cultural and educational capacities of the object, and it was concluded that it can be an object-generator in the construction of new discourses and understandings about the crime it portrays and, above all, about the racism that integrates the Brazilian social structure, giving rise to educational and cultural activities that collaborate in the Teaching for Ethnic-Racial Relations (ERER).