Leprosy in Pará: The colony of Marituba and the Educandário Eunice Weaver, memory, materiality and payment.

• Grant number: 22/08043-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: December 01, 2023
• End date: October 31, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Applied Social Sciences - Architecture and Town Planning
• Principal Investigator: Renato Cymbalista
• Grantee: Livia Gaby Costa
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo (FAU). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This project aims to research two places that care for leprosy and their families in Brazil, State of Pará, the Marituba Leprosy Colony and the Eunice Weaver Educandário. "Documents" of assistance to the disease marked by the prophylactic tripod established after the 1930 Revolution of the Brazilian Federal Government, as drivers of the urban formation of peripheral neighborhoods of Belém and its metropolitan area, through narratives of segregation. The objective is also to research, as it is currently configured, the memorial heritage of these urban and intra-urban spaces of the State.We started with conflicting cases, the colony assisted leprosy patients and, even today, it is a site that presents remnants of materialities in use and disuse, patient care, and social actors from the former institution who live in loco and work in projects that aim to protect their trajectories. experiences that are at risk of erasure. The Educandário Eunice Weaver, on the other hand, assisted healthy children, compulsorily separated from their families in the State of Pará, and is currently partially erased, deteriorated and invaded.Spaces of different formations that, however, are linked as instruments of contradictory regimes, such as suffering and healing, stigma and security, sites of problematic memory that, even in the face of compulsory erasures, we believe, as a hypothesis, that they are present in social memory these regions and boosted their urban formation. However, these "documents" are currently at risk of being completely silenced. Thus, it is envisaged to reimagine and discuss the future of these problematic memory sites, allowing, making them visible and protecting them as places of symbolic reparation for leprosy patients and their families.