Arte pública, paisagem urbana e memória: monumentos passo-fundenses de Paulo Batista de Siqueira

Abstract

This work presents Paulo Batista de Siqueira’s monuments, a plastic artist, who made his sculptures with refuse materials, mainly iron and steel, united by soldering and transformed in personalities, mythological gods, (i) migrants, explorers , colonists. Elements that delineate in a panoramic way the history of the mentioned artist, as well as the relations of sense present between his productions are presented. Siqueira's ability to create, through his sculptures, representations of identity, whose memory is recorded in monuments, did social groups and the public power to contract their services. The passo-fundenses monuments in analysis are public art, that has by characteristic the accessibility of the public, allowing aesthetic enjoyment and dialogue with the passers-by and / or visitors. Among the art works are the monument Teixeirinha, Trigo, Ferroviários, Metalúrgicos and Cavalariano that are inserted in the urban passo-fundense landscape, some have become symbols of the Passo Fundo urbanity. The problem focuses is identifying the possible motivations that led political, social and cultural elites to propose and finance these monuments. At the same time, it seeks to verify how the processes of composition of the mentioned sculptures occurred, the symbolic meanings projected in the metal and the potential valuation as patrimonial assets, which intrinsically carries historical and aesthetic elements. The theoretical basis is based on authors such as Prats (1997) and Canclini (1999) regarding the understanding of patrimony as social construction. Considering that the estates are reframed in the interaction with their readers, they show power, economic, political, cultural relations and the social representations rooted in the diverse groups that compose the societies. In this sense, the concept of cultural representations becomes central to the study, and art is conceived as a mediator that enables the interpretant to evoke absent presences. Added to this are the notions of monument and memory, based in Le Goff (2003). In addition to the sculptures themselves, they constitute periodical research sources that deal with the theme (proposition and inauguration of monuments), bills of law and municipal decrees, guiding the analyzes in both aesthetic and historical terms. So, although the monuments analyzed are works of art, it can be seen that the valuation that occurs is not for its aesthetic value as an art, but rather because it represents some specific memories of elites, which allows some forgetting and / or deletion in terms of collectivity.