The Museum House typology and the passage from the private to the public: the Ema Klabin House Museum and the Mesa (Ex) Posta exhibition

Abstract

This article intends to investigate the House Museum typology and specifically the House Museum Ema Klabin, a collector’s house museum that, due to its institutional aspects, evokes the memory of domestic environments, of the practices and knowledge, lived there, at the same time that it presents objects and artifacts of a collection of cultural interest that testifies to epistemologies based on material culture. To this end, this article investigates the environment of the Dining Room and the Mesa (Ex) Posta exhibition held since 2014 in biannual editions as a case study and seeks to understand the articulations that operate through exhibition design, understood as part of the project. The article is based on the field of private collecting to make a brief presentation of the historical origins of the House Museum typology and is anchored in fundamental authors in the field of design, Rafael Cardoso and Igor Kopytoff, for understanding exhibition design.