Author:

Leandro Vacaro

Resumo:

This research seeks to understand the communicative potential of an object belonging to the collection of the Rio Grande do Sul Hip Hop Culture Museum (MUCHRS), the cover of the album by the Porto Alegre-based RAP music group L.O.R.D.S., entitled “Homem Errado” (Wrong Man). The art and texts on this cover narrate, from the perspective of the group members, the events surrounding the murder of Júlio Cesar de Melo Pinto, a Black man who was mistaken for one of the robbers who invaded a supermarket in the East Zone of Porto Alegre in 1987, by agents of the Military Brigade. The investigation focused on the methodology of bibliographic and documentary analysis and semi-structured interviews with a professional from MUCHRS, with the victim’s widow, and with a member of the L.O.R.D.S group at the time of the album’s release, proposing a reinterpretation of the object (which currently forms part of MUCHRS’s long-term exhibition on the origins of the Hip Hop Movement in Rio Grande do Sul), enabling communication with the institution’s visitors and the community in general about this exemplary episode of racism and police violence against the Black and marginalized population of the city of Porto Alegre. For the theoretical foundation, the following concepts were interconnected: 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 concluded that it can be a generating object in the construction of new discourses and understandings regarding the crime it portrays and, above all, about the racism that is part of the Brazilian social structure, giving rise to educational and cultural activities that contribute to Teaching for Ethnic-Racial Relations (ERER).