With the present formal structure consisting of four glass display table-boxes and the schematic diagram of the collection, which has been restructured at each new exhibition, the Mabe Bethônico and the Collector program is one of several ways of exhibiting the work, the rest of which is kept in the museum library. This program is most certainly one of many different ways of approaching the work.
Another point to be brought up is the radically ephemeral character of this work, which ultimately consists of newspaper clippings that tend to yellow and become brittle over time. Would this be a symptom of a digital data age? Perhaps so, although the artist has used multimedia devices as tools in developing the archive. Mabe Bethônico, we know for sure, chose a fictional figure (the collector of the title) as accomplice and anonymous coauthor for the project. This collector is responsible for the quotes that make up the exhibitions and provide clues for viewer-readers.
One might also draw attention to the three essays shown here, which all consist exclusively of images:
**Destruction: Box III: The Inside of the Outside I and II (Kitchen) (thirty-nine clippings)
this is a series that boasts a high compositional coherence. It shows life-threatening situations in which people carry household objects out of their homes and onto the streets. It is a metaphor for the dissolution of the boundary between public and private space in contemporary political confrontation.
**Destruction: Box IV: Women and Destruction (seventy-three clippings)
occupying two display table-boxes, this essay reflects the representation of women in scenes of war and desolation (Kosovo, Middle East, social exclusion in Brazil, etc.). Staging, as a typical journalistic resource of the 1990s, finds its explicit records here in images of disturbing visual beauty.