MABE BETHONICO

"Mabe Bethônico e O Colecionador (I)", the exhibition to open the program dedicated to the Museu de Arte da Pampulha's collection, includes a work which is not effectively incorporated to its holdings, although it is a priority for acquisition. The work O Colecionador [The Collector] has been chosen precisely because it questions museological structures and systems of acquisition, exhibition and conservation, forcing the Museum to rethink itself and to adapt to the work's antimuseological characteristics. A challenge such as this one is increasingly presented in various and unexpected ways, to the contemporary art institution. Even more, O Colecionador, as its title indicates, discusses central issues concerning the notion of the collection, the collector and the activity of collecting.
Mabe Bethõnico began O Colecionador in 1996 and has since been developing, enlarging and adding complexity to it. The work consists of a large archive of images and texts taken from newspapers and organised according to a classification departing from four themes: "Destruction", "Corrosion", "Construction" and "Flowers". From these initial main themes, a number of other subtitles are distributed in folders, called "essays". This classification, seemingly totalizing and rigorous is in fact highly changeable and seems never to satisfy the encyclopaedic and organising spirit of the archivist collector. At each new incursion through periodicals, boxes and folders, Mabe Bethônico and the collector often find new titles, themes and rubrics, either combining categories, either subdividing them.