Education and heritage in Dona Yayá's House: experiences of the Cultural Preservation Center at USPCenter

Abstract

This paper presents a panoramic view of the education action developed by Centro de Preservação Cultural — CPC (Cultural Preservation Center) at its headquarters, Casa de Dona Yayá (Dona Yayá´s House), a landmark listed by both municipal and state-level preservation institutions, located in São Paulo City downtown, in the region known as Bixiga. A culture and extension office within University of São Paulo, aimed at reflecting and acting upon the university’s cultural heritage, CPC is housed in the building known as “Dona Yayá’s House” since 2004. The place is site of memory related to gender and mental health issues due to being place of reclusion for around four decades of its most well-known denizen (Sebastiana Mello Freire, “Ms. Yayá”), as well as a physical testimony of the urbanization process of the region in which it is located. In order to reflect upon the educational, dialogical, and cultural action possibilities proper both to a heritage-related institution and a listed property carrying a series of layers of meaning and memory, a critical
itinerary of around 15 years of educational activities is presented. We discuss, based on such activities, the potentials, limits, challenges and contradictions of the education action in the context of heritage.