Border museums and the musealization of football – the place of football memory in the Brazilian museal field (1960s-1990s)

Abstract

This article focuses on the pioneering role of the Museums of Image and Sound of Rio de Janeiro (MIS-RJ) and São Paulo (MIS-SP) in creating collections of interviews about football in Brazil. The initiative of the administrators and supporters of these museums – producer Ricardo Cravo Albin, in Rio, and historian José Sebastião Witter, in São Paulo – created a specific series and integrated football into the artistic-cultural axes dear to the two institutions, which aim to assemble collections on Brazilian sound. The interviews conducted with players, coaches, sports journalists and club managers by both museums, although without scientific criteria recognized by the Academy, or with incipient parameters that later informed the methodology of Oral History in Brazil, allowed the recording of the memory and trajectory of a set of football professionals, starting in the 1960s and ending in the mid-1990s. This article aims to present the constitution process of these two projects during the second half of the twentieth century to understand the role of certain agents in the recognition of the place of football in the context of each museum. Amid continuities and discontinuities, we seek to evaluate the impact of this type of record group and the influence of collections dedicated to sports memory in other museum-like institutions in Brazil that became autonomous in the following decades, such as the Football Museum (2008) and its interview project “Football, memory and heritage.