The Centro de Interpretação do Pampa is a new museum conceived from the ruins of the Old Military Infirmary of Jaguarão, built in 1880 on the border line between Brazil and Uruguay, that deals with the singularity of the physical and human landscape of what is known as the Pampa, within the framework of the Brazilian experience. It is a Living Museum in which visitors can experience the specificity and richness of the region’s nature, culture and unrepeatable history.

 

 

The Museum organizes a vast set of information from some central axes. The first of these is the uniqueness of the natural landscape of the Pampa and its ecosystems. A place where, under apparent homogeneity, lies a rich and diverse pulsating life. The second axis is the antiquity of the occupation of the region, inhabited successively by peoples and cultures since prehistory.

​

The third aspect highlighted here is the unique genetic and symbolic miscegenation that took place in the Pampa - a unique mixture of indigenous peoples, Iberians and Africans that generated the gaucho - and the specific cultural production that this miscegenation provided. The spoken language, the music, the literature, the mythology, the architecture, the customs, the cuisine and the clothing are as mixed as the color of people's skin. Such human adventure, marked by the encounters and disagreements of peoples and signs, by convergences and conflicts, by contradictions and inequalities, continues to be made.

​

The fourth axis is the question of the frontier and the constitution of an identity, at once singular and national. The region was the setting for wars and struggles that, in a way, drew the boundaries of the Brazilian territory, with its continental dimensions. A place of heroism and of struggle for nationality. But also an experience, avant la lettre, of integration, that anticipated Mercosul in centuries.

Now fully recovered and renewed, the Old Nursery, Historical Heritage of Rio Grande do Sul, is reborn with new functions. It is there that the Centro de Interpretação do Pampa will illuminate the landscape.

​

Crew

Curatorship: Isa Grinspum Ferraz and Marcelo Macca

Consultant in history, language and literature: Aldyr Schlee

Consultant in genetics: Sergio Pena

Consultant in biology and ecology: Heinrich Hasenack

Consultant in paleonthology and archeology: Jairo Henrique Rogge

Exhibition technology: Peter Lindquist e Nicola Bernardo / KJPL

Creation of digital interfaces and apps: 32 bits

​

Architecture and expography: Brasil Arquitetura

Authors: Francisco Fanucci e Marcelo Ferraz

 

Unipampa

Iphan

Ibram

Brazilian Ministry of Culture