Rationale of the exhibition 

A research project rooted in Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis (EMCA),  a scientific collaboration between Switzerland and Brasil, and video-recordings in a forensic laboratory in São Paulo. This unusual cocktail has generated a unique event: the exhibition Fazer falar os ossos: engajamentos presentes com o passado/Making Bones Talk: present engagements with the past will open on Friday, August 14, 2026, at the Centro MariAntonia in São Paulo.

 

The exhibition brings together two perspectives and two very different worlds: the work of researchers in conversation analysis, ethnomethodology, and interactional linguistics specialized in multimodal analysis, and the work of forensic investigators in a laboratory specialised in the re-identification of missing persons. This articulation was born thanks to an original partnership between on the one hand the research project Fazendo falar os ossos/Making Bones Talk, developed at the University of Basel (Lorenza Mondada) and the Federal University of São Paulo (Fernanda Cruz), funded by the SNSF (Switzerland) and the FAPESP (Brasil) and on the other hand the Center for Forensic Anthropology and Archaeology (CAAF, located at the Federal University of São Paulo, represented by Edson Teles). The project started informally in 2022 with the first video-recordings of forensic activities at the CAAF laboratory; it was funded from 2025 on by the SNSF/FAPESP for four years; data and results of this first phase have been used for the exhibition.

 

The exhibition has two complementary objectives. First, it highlights the everyday work of forensic specialists investigating the bones of people who were killed or disappeared in Brasil during the dictatorship (1964–1988), doing so by mobilizing the video analyses developed within the research project Making Bones Talk. Second, it gives to see how the EMCA perspective casts unique light on forensic practices, by highlighting its uses of video and multimodal transcripts and materializing the resulting praxeological and interactional analyses of the lab’s work in the exhibition’s scenography. In this sense the exhibition is about forensic practices as much as about EMCA’s practices: The close attention devoted to video recordings and  multimodal transcriptions, produced and studied in the Making Bones Talk project, enables an original analytical and aesthetic understanding of forensic work, observed through the details of talk, gestures, gaze, bodies, and the specialists’ sensory engagement with bones.

 

By offering a vivid image of the work of forensic anthropologists, the exhibition connects the past and the present: it invites the public to engage with a set of contemporary practices committed to a history that still needs to be uncovered. It revisits knowledge and imaginaries related to disappearance and dictatorship as well as the role of forensic practices for building evidences of mass violence and violations of human rights. It shows unique and inedit images of present interventions, often ignored, which inform the past in new ways.

 

In this sense, the exhibition reveals the potential of research in the social sciences and linguistics as well as inedit facets of the work of forensic anthropology, within a lively presentation of research video materials that enable the public to understand the practices of both the researcher and the researched teams.

 

A rich collateral program is available during the length of the exhibition, featuring a series of films about forensic investigations, followed by debates about the forensic turn and how EMCA research can contribute to it, a university course open to the public on forensic inquiries and the history of dictatorship, and a roundtable with families of persons disappeared during the dictatorship in Brasil.

 

What: Exhibition Fazer Falar os Ossos.

Who: Curators: Lorenza Mondada, Fernanda Cruz, Edson Teles.

Who: Scenography, visual identity, production: Oficina Goma.

Where: Centro MariAntonia, USP, Rua Maria Antônia, 258 São Paulo, Brasil.

When: From August 14, to September 27, 2026

When: Tue-Sun 10h-18h (free entrance).

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 website exhibition: 

 https://www.mariantonia.prceu.usp.br/mostra-apresenta-trabalho-da-antropologia-forense-sobre-a-ditadura/

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 website parallel program: 

 https://www.mariantonia.prceu.usp.br/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Programacao-paralela-exposicao-Fazer-falar-os-ossos.pdf

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 instagram: 

@fazerfalarosossos