Witnessing the ordinary: travestilities, politics of memory, and transmutation at the Museum of Image and Sound of Ceará

Abstract

This article analyzes the process of institutionalizing a travesti memory policy at the Museum of Image and Sound of Ceará Chico Albuquerque, based on the Trair o CIStema program. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in 2024, the study followed the first Creation Workshop on Transvestigender Technologies, led by travesti artist-educators, focusing on its formative, pedagogical, and creative dynamics, as well as on the experiences of the artists within the institution. The analysis shows that the workshop constitutes a space for the production of travesti memory, enacted through ordinary practices of creation, care, and the elaboration of experiences shaped by institutional violence. At the same time, it demonstrates that the implementation of this policy does not eliminate dynamics of exclusion but rather reconfigures them within the everyday life of the museum, continuously challenging conditions of access and permanence. The article also examines the process of developing Public Call No. 014/2023, which enabled the initiative, understanding it as a memory policy that produces specific forms of inclusion while revealing institutional structures that, shaped by inequalities of race, gender, and territory, limit access and permanence for travestis. As a result, the museum is understood as a field of dispute, in which trans-centered artistic and pedagogical practices generate shifts in regimes of memory, visibility, and listening. The article concludes that these experiences constitute processes of institutional transmutation, as they introduce other temporalities, epistemologies, and ways of inhabiting the museum space, albeit in partial and unstable ways, and in constant tension with structures that have historically sustained exclusion.