Still on the Santiago Round Table: considerations on the concept of territory and its reverberations

Abstract

The article is part of a movement to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Roundtable of Santiago de Chile, to make considerations around the uses and meanings, presence and absence of the debate on territory and museums established since then. The reflections are oriented towards understanding and problematizing how terms related to community, place, area, territory and their semantic and notional relatives were, and are, mobilized. The exercise is conducted by looking at the Declaration of Santiago de Chile, from 1972, in dialogue with the literature that followed and continues to inspire practices and ideas in the museum field. It argues that the territorial approach was incipient in that historical context and that, in recent decades, the notional set that orbits the territory category has emerged as an important analytical category for museum actions. Due to this, it defends the necessary effort of dialogue with territorial literature – essentially multidisciplinary – with the aim of instrumentalizing practices in the museum field and continuing to feed new theoretical systematizations.