With an exclusive program, Centro Cultural Vale Maranhão is part of the activities of the 24th National Museum Week

The National Museum Week, in 2026, has the theme “Museums: uniting a divided world”, in an invitation to reflect on the role of culture and art as potentiators of unity in the face of a global context marked by rupture. Thus, museums reaffirm themselves as instruments for the promotion of dialogue and collectivity.

At the CCVM, the program begins with the unprecedented course “The Centenary of Milton Santos: the public intellectual and the advent of the Popular Period of History”, taught by professor and doctor in geography Luiz Eduardo Neves. The course presents the life, intellectual trajectory, theory, and studies of the Bahian geographer Milton Santos, discussing central categories of his work. An interpreter from Brazil, he designed the National Geography and renewed his studies with a critical theory of space. His analyses illuminate the socio-spatial contradictions of the modern world from the Global South. The course will be held from May 19 to 22, from 15:00 to 18:00.

Another activity in the program is the presentation of Vila Embratel’s Bumba Meu Boi Novo Capricho at the Open Courtyard of the CCVM, on May 21 (Thursday), at 19:00. With more than 30 years of history and directly from Alcântara, Mestre Marcílio presents the traditional ritual of the Zabumba Slaughter with the Ox Novo Capricho da Vila Embratel. Bringing together more than 25 characters, including bullies, cowboys, ragados and rumbles, the presentation reinforces Zabumba’s striking accent.

A fixed program that is part of the annual Museum Week are the exhibitions on display. Currently, the CCVM has four exhibitions on display: (1) The Wave Is The Way of the Wind, which brings together unpublished works by the visual artists Silvana Mendes and Tassila Custodes; (2) Origins of the World | Indigenous Ceramics, which uses ceramics as the guiding thread of the traditions of its people, highlighting its artistic, historical and social value; (3) Fio D’Água, which presents six cities that imagine possible futures for the ocean in the face of climate change, designed by French artists Cécile Palusinski and Elsa Mroziewicz; (4) and Original Resistencias, where the photographer Christine Leidgens brings records of her wanderings through indigenous communities in Bolivia, quilombola communities and black villages in the Amazon and Africa, in addition to the Piaroa people, in Venezuela. The exhibitions are open to the visiting public during the operation of the CCVM – from Tuesday to Saturday, from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.

All activities at the Vale Maranhão Cultural Center are free and open to the public!