When we think of museums, we think of venues with artworks displayed on the walls or untouchable historical pieces protected by glass. This reality however has been changing! More and more cultural venues, including Brazilian museums, rely on technology, with tools that are more “I touch you” than “don’t touch me”.
Many well-known Brazilian museums have interactive experiences that attract not only the enthusiastic traveler for knowledge, history, and culture, but also those curious to know how technology is used in the “houses of knowledge”!
Here is a list of venues with interactive options for the whole family that can inspire the itinerary of your next holiday trip to Brazil.
Football Museum - During the World Cup, the national football passion has even more prominence in tourist itineraries. Those in São Paulo (SP), can get familiar with the history of the sport and do a virtual shooting drill!
Founded in 2008, the Football Museum is located at the Pacaembu Stadium and has fifteen rooms dedicated to interviews, photographs, audio, books, academic works, objects, and interactive experiences that allow tourists to understand why football is part of the Brazilian culture and identity.
Museum of Tomorrow - In Brazil, for tourists in love with sun and beach, Rio de Janeiro is an almost compulsory stop! It is also a cultural hub, whose architecture already has technology as a strong ally of art.
In the city center, the Museum of Tomorrow was founded in 2015 to make visitors think about the future. We all know the questions that fill our imagination: where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going? How do we want to go? The museum makes us interactively ponder the answers.
For example, in the Cosmos venue, the visitor is invited to enter a 360-degree projection dome with six interactive screens that allow you to explore galaxies, the interior of the sun or the core of atoms.
Museum Do Ipiranga - After nine years closed, Museum do Ipiranga reopened this year with a more modern and interactive perspective on the last two hundred years, culminating in the transformation of Brazil into a nation.
The works were made possible with funds from the Cultural Incentive Law. The Ministry of Tourism approved R$ 183 million which, in addition to the restoration of over three thousand items in the archive, made it possible to repair the architecture, and flooring, install lifts and access ramps, construct a new building and multisensory exhibitions.
With better accessibility and inclusion, the institution wants to represent historical periods through material culture. There are 48 rooms open to the public. Along the way, we can find more than three hundred multisensorial resources, such as touch screens, scale models and enlarged replicas of objects. And seventy audio-visual items that portray the history of Brazil and São Paulo, as well as the museum’s memory.
Not to mention the stunning 360-degree perspective of the city of São Paulo and Jardim Francês, with fully recovered geometrical shapes, perfect symmetry, and well-defined broad paths. Something to delight any tourist!
Sesi Lab - Whoever visits Brasília (DF), besides civic tourism, can get to know a stronghold of science, technology, innovation, and education for all ages, besides a tourist and architectonic attraction worthy of a cultural heritage city.
Recently opened, the place was housed in an iconic building designed by Oscar Niemeyer during the Federal Capital construction. It brings together 100 interactive experiments in a long-term exhibition, as well as temporary shows and a varied cultural programme.
One of the interactive experiments is a voltaic piano for music fans. The instrument produces music from electric currents. There is also a 3D puzzle that stimulates creativity and exercises the mind. For those who love literature, the different-sized chairs, just like the ones in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, recreate the imagination of any book.
Museum Da Gente Sergipana - Aracuju (SE), the capital of Sergipe, has since 2011 been the first interactive multimedia museum of the Brazilian North and Northeast regions. With several technological resources, visitors are encouraged to learn about the history of Sergipe and its natives. It is one of the highly popular Brazilian museums that is worth seeing.
Besides being able to know the material and immaterial cultural heritage of the state, such as the art of mamulengos (puppet show), visitors can interact with the market vendor “Josevende,” who sells his products and merchandise with humor.
And the venue has a pleasant view of the Sergipe River and the Largo da Gente Sergipana. It is a must-see on any tourist itinerary!
Museum of Nature - In the Serra da Capivara National Park, the interior of Piauí, a super technological and interactive venue narrates the transformations of life on Earth where climate change is the protagonist.
The Nature Museum has a coiled format and twelve rooms that feed a multi-sensory journey about the climate impacts on the transformations of fauna and flora. In one of the rooms, we can enter the ice age. And why is that in one of the hottest states in Brazil? Thousands of years ago, scientists believe Piauí was a very cold place under the ice.
We can also travel in a virtual reality simulator that makes visitors feel what it’s like to fly a hang glider over the local mountains. There is also the screening of a film narrated by the singer Maria Bethânia, reflecting on the effects of the presence of human beings on Earth.
Museum of Fil Festival Gramado - The beautiful Gramado (RS), better known as the “Brazilian Europe,” allows visitors not only to experience the climate, culture, and gastronomy like that of the old continent, but an immersion in Brazilian cinema.
Operating since 2016, Museu do Festival de Cinema de Gramado allows the public to interact with posters, images, original writings with film projections, interactive games, and mini cinema, contemplating the history of the festival’s five decades and all stages of Brazilian and Latin American cinema.
One of the highlights is the interactive game “You are the Film Director,” where the visitor can define the story, characters, and soundtrack of their film.
