Working with monuments as a possibility of resistance to the processes of invisibilization of social groups

Abstract

The monuments of a city are historical sources that can become evidences when they are questioned on several questions that make it possible to reflect on many elements that constitute the societies that built them. Relationships between social groups, invisibility and visibility strategies, inequalities between men and women experienced by different pasts and also in the present are materialized in the city spaces, revealing how everything that a society produces is bound up with its values, conceptions and beliefs. Thus, this article aims to discuss heritage education from the perspective of Historical Education from the work with monuments that represent women, female figures or are homage to female personalities from the city of Belo Horizonte, capital and largest city in the state of Minas Gerais and one of the most populous in Brazil. For this purpose, a research of the monuments of women or those that honor them was based on the Belo Horizonte Monuments Inventory elaborated by the Belo Horizonte Municipal Tourism Company (BELOTUR), in 2008. This research, based on the Inventory of BELOTUR, had the objective of identifying the monuments of Belo Horizonte, observing items to, later, proceed to an analysis from the patrimonial education and the historical investigation. It is believed that discussing heritage education through work with the monuments of a city, in the perspective of historical education, can promote the identification of mechanisms of invisibility of social groups in the past and their maintenance in the present, in addition to enabling resistance this invisibility of groups that were and continue to be excluded in and by society.