People and groups present at Casa do Povo

if they are not “public,” then what are they?

Abstract

Resulting from a public program carried out with parts of the Casa do Povo community, this article unfolds in descriptive and conceptual terms the typology coined locally to designate the ways of people and groups’ involvement in the institutional life of this cultural center in São Paulo. The discussion’s motto comes from the shared understanding that presence in the equipment is not covered by conventional public roles, such as “visitors” and “spectators”. This inference serves as a starting point for an approach whose method chooses to compare the set of native designations with parameters from the literature related to the studies of publics. This is linked to a perspective oriented towards the institution's policy, with the guide of the “new institutionalism” serving to situate its ways of promoting participation and, even more, a distributed dynamic of management of this “living monument” of Jewish-progressive genesis, which its program and governance were restructured since 2013, a decisive year for the country's political direction.