MASF: An Art Museum that Connects Territory and Communities

Transforming a public staircase into an open-air art museum, MASF is more than just a collection of artifacts. The museum is the realization of a collective dream of fostering important personalities engaged in the local art scene, combining cultural practices with knowledge, poetry and leisure, where resistance leads to urban preservation.

by Rogério Felix

Wed 19 Mar, 2025

Across the broad dimensions of African diasporas, whether colonial or contemporary, there is much to share and learn about the diverse territories that comprise them. One is the former parish of São Miguel de Cotegipe, or Simões Filho, as it came to be known in 1960, after its political and legal emancipation from the city of Salvador. The municipality of Simões Filho has been a haven of unique cultural events and presentations, such as the Baile Pastoril Queimada da Palinha, and had almost no public or independent cultural facilities.

Within this context, artist Augusto Leal decided to create the Simões Filho Art Museum (MASF), an experiment that has broadened his artistic practice, previously grounded in urban interventions and sculpture. “MASF is the realization of a collective dream. It’s the synthesis of a historical process of collective struggle for cultural facilities and public policies to promote the production and enjoyment of art in Simões Filho,” the artist revealed in one of our many in-person and online conversations. “While promoting encounters between people, a space for artists to exhibit and perform their work, and aesthetic experiences for visitors, it reveals what’s lacking in the town, but especially people’s desire for spaces like this, based on the public’s support for the exhibitions and actions we’ve created at MASF.”

Augusto Leal in front of MASF. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.

Born in 1987 and raised in Simões Filho, Leal earned a master’s in visual arts from the School of Fine Arts at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA). Leal has channeled his poetics to, among other acts, disrupt and intervene in political absences, debate the forms of the art system and operate within the relationships between people and the city. One of his first notable projects was the Bibliocicleta, a mobile library created in response to the lack of libraries.

MASF was inaugurated in 2023, through a painting collaboration between artists and city residents. Its initial perimeter is a staircase that connects Avenida Elmo Serejo Faria to Rua Anísio Teixeira, in the Cia 1 neighborhood. “Along with all these motivations related to the context of the space, it’s also important to debate what a museum can be. In 2022, I made my first trip to São Paulo to participate in two exhibitions in the city. I took the opportunity to visit as many museums as I could,” explains Leal. “While it was great to see works of art in person that I had only seen in books or on screens, the museum experience was frustrating. In general, it felt like a hostile space for people to be present […]. When I returned to Simões Filho, walking through the city, I saw this staircase. And in contrast to what I felt in those museums, I thought about transforming this space of crossing and passage into a space of permanence.”

Bibliocicleta. Photo: Diney Araújo

The first curatorial cycle organized by Leal was entitled Histórias simõesfilhenses, centered on three exhibitions and a program of visits. Each of the exhibitions was constructed intimately, over the course of three months, in a dialectical manner, in order to catalyze the poetic desires linked to claims on the territory.

Financial support from the award Prêmio Museu é Mundo enabled the museum to put on the solo photography exhibition Diney Araújo, a lente generosa (2023), the collective painting exhibition As vozes da terra (2023-24), spearheaded by Luís Santos and O Relicário das artes (2024), an installation by Carla Vivian Mattos, one of the artists who leads Relicário — a nearby independent cultural space that offers programming in music, the visual arts, and artisanal medicine. MASF exhibitions promote important personalities from the local arts scene engaged in recording popular cultural expressions in Bahian theater and in the production of paintings derived from the experience of the Afro-indigenous body.

Exhibition Diney Araújo, a lente generosa (2023). Foto: Augusto Leal

The emotional relationship forged between residents and surroundings, as well as museum and territory resulted in a place open 24 hours a day, free of charge, without a team of educators or security, with high attendance by students. Further proof of the community’s engagement with MASF was the decision by Ana Débora, a neighboring resident, to become the museum’s guardian. More than a collection of artifacts, MASF is the bubbling over of an artistic and museological process based on a desire to create a venue in the town to bring together cultural practices: knowledge, poetry and leisure.

Exhibition O Relicário das artes (2024). Foto: Augusto Leal

MASF has become a museum that innovates in its architectural form and in community engagement to enable strategies for resistance to be configured as acts of urban preservation, demonstrating that yes, community places of memory are necessary for connecting cultural heritages and for the fulfillment of the needs of the present.

Rogério Felix (1997, Salvador, Brazil) is a researcher and independent curator. He hold a bachelor’s in museum studies and is studying for a master’s in Visual Arts, both from the Federal University of Bahia. Recently, he has been researching African art exhibitions at state museums and institutions in Salvador. He is interested in the relationships between (im)material culture and contemporary art, operating through documentation, cultural-educational action and criticism, in addition to organizing collections and exhibitions. He currently works as a docent at the Mãe Mirinha de Portão Community Museum, located in the city of Lauro de Freitas, where he organized the exhibition Paths of Memories: One Hundred Years of Mãe Mirinha de Portão (2024).