the country’s most ancient memories, as well as the stories which are impossible to encounter in any other place, stories which are transmitted orally, feeding the collective imaginary which sometimes is limited to small parcels of the territory.

The exhibition “Territory and Community” occupies two old industrial hangars that were reconstructed in order to receive the new institution, and is based on two main nucleus: the frist one, the Territory, is descriptive and historical, a presentation of the city of Guimarães; the second evokes the city’s individual and collective subjectivity, and focus on the symbolic objects and on the symbolic dimensions of the community’s daily routines, mainly through the auscultation of the city’s inhabitants.

“To conceive a permanent exhibition about a cultural and physical territory several thousand years old and about the communities that inhabit(ed) it, while at the same time creating a new collection and a stable narrative of the past, composed of both material and immaterial contents, constitutes an ambitious, exciting and delicate curatorial task. To research, collect and display memory requires taking in consideration both the sedimentary certainties which resist time as well as the numerous ambiguities brought forth through the awareness of the passage of time – a dialogue between history and memory, in its mutual articulation and erosion. Even if the House of memory is not a city museum, and considering that it does not have the intention of neither replacing nor imitating the mission of the other institutions of Guimarães devoted to similar fields of knowledge, this exhibition establishes a dialogical relations and promptly reproduces objects; however, its main objective is to provide a wide perspective towards the city’s cultural and territorial landscape.”

The making of Casa da Memória

Territory and Community:
from Pátria factory to the House of Memory of Guimarães

Inês Moreira (editor)
A Oficina (publisher)
Guimarães 2017 [pt/eng]

The House of Memory of Guimarães is the new cultural center dedicated to the history of Guimarães, to its territory and its community. The permanent exposition of the CDMG is a kaleidoscope of stories and memories installed in the reconverted Pátria Factory and it is distributed by two industrial hangars: Territory and Community. The House encompasses about 6000 years of history, its facts and documents, also exposing as ambiguities, fragments and fictions that are part of individual and collective memory of the city.

Contributors
José Bastos, Inês Moreira, Sofia Romualdo, Ana Bragança, Miguel Guedes e José Carlos Melo Dias, Catarina Pereira, Eduardo Brito, Manuel Morais Sarmento Pizarro, Andrew Howard, Francisco Brito, Tito Mouraz, Gonçalo M. Tavares, Ana Aragão