Fronteiras conceituais: a cidade da música da Bahia entre o equipamento cultural e o museu

Abstract

This research investigates how the City of Music of Bahia constitutes itself as a cultural facility and builds its legitimacy in the museum field in Salvador. It is based on the hypothesis that the space develops a twofold discursive strategy, presenting itself institutionally as a cultural facility, but publicly projecting an image of a museum by means of formal records, journalistic articles, and curatorial representations. Its general objective is to analyze the processes of promoting and perceiving the City of Music of Bahia as a museum, by investigating the construction of its meanings and symbolic legitimacies. Its specific objectives are to comprehend how institutional and media communication contributes to the construction of the imaginary about cultural facilities; to explore the conceptual and professional boundaries between cultural facilities and museums, based on the notion of cultural hybridism; and to analyze how the institutional structure and the participation of museology professionals influence the symbolic legitimation of the facility. The research adopts a qualitative, exploratory methodology, using study cases as the central approach, complemented by literature review and document analysis, including journalistic and digital analysis, institutional records, and direct observation of the space. The results indicate that the City of Music of Bahia is a hybrid cultural institution, whose strategy of discursive ambiguity enables the legitimization of the museum, but hides substantive weaknesses in the implementation of fundamental museological practices, such as the absence of a museological project and professionals from Museology. It is concluded that the space exemplifies the transformations of the contemporary cultural field, where hybrid institutions challenge traditional parameters, unveiling tensions between innovation and commitment to protocols in the Museology area.