Furniture, household items, work tools, photographs and graphic materials. These are some of the objects chosen over six decades by the collector duo Calito and Tina. Presented in the exhibition Design and daily life in the Azevedo Moura collection, held by the Ipiranga Museum between May and September 2025, the set values manual production and affective bonds with everyday objects.
With museological coordination and production by Expomus and curated by design historian Adélia Borges, the project brought together 930 items acquired over decades, since the mid-1960s, in the states of Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina and Paraná, produced by European immigrants in southern Brazil between the second half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century.
The collection represents the social imaginary and daily life of German and Italian immigrants and reveals personal aspects of the domestic universe of people who sought to build a new life. The works combine the memories, techniques and customs brought by immigrants from their homeland, on the one hand, and the conditions and materials they found in the land of adoption, on the other.
Divided into ten thematic sections and a video room, the exhibition was designed to emphasize the beauty and design of pieces that were not created for the elite, but for ordinary people, who contributed to the formation of a collective memory based on cultural exchanges. By coming into contact with the collection, the public will be able to recognize elements that may be part of their own stories. This identification happens because, as it is daily, the collection can gain personal meanings for each visitor.
A part of the collection was presented at the exhibition Artifacts of the South – Legacies of German and Italian Immigration, held in 2024, in Porto Alegre, in celebration of the 200th anniversary of German immigration in Rio Grande do Sul and the 150th anniversary of Italian immigration in Brazil. The exhibition had its early closure due to the floods that hit the state.
Gallery
