In Our Care. The Keeper's Choice. - Hell

“In Our Care - The Keeper’s Choice” is a collection of nine autonomous documentaries that illustrate the backstage of a national art museum and the daily work of those who keep its doors open. In each film, a surveillance guard of the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, in Lisbon, invites visitors and the general public to appreciate works of their choice from the permanent exhibition, in a presentation that crosses art, everyday life and biography.

It is a project that aims to divulge and value art and those who everyday ensure its safety and the contact between visitors and museum collections.

The role of a museum guard stands in a crossroad between surveillance and costumer service, a strange duplicity that requires a balance between high-contrast scenarios - large crowds of visitors are opposed to long hours of emptiness and monotony, during which they are left with the company of the art pieces they guard. There is an emotional weight attached to this contrast; how do different people deal with this routine and how does the art all around them affect the passing of the days?

Several questions drove our production process:
What interactions are born from meeting visitors from all around the world? How does each one deal with the slow passing of time and with the peculiar scenario of an art museum? Do the pieces from the collection help them going through the long hours? Are those artworks companions that stir their imagination? Which contact is more enriching - the visitors or the works of art? Before being museum watchers, were they visitors themselves? What journey brought them there?

The project took off with an invitation from MNAA to its surveillance team, with nine guards voluntarily stepping in and choosing their favourite pieces from the collection. After that, all participants took their approach making the research: for some, the everyday observation has already built a vast knowledge about the chosen piece; others have known it since they were children, when they visited the museum for the first time as visitors. Some opted for a more spontaneous route, talking about the immediate feelings evoked by the artwork, and some made deep research within the museum bibliography.

Interviewed by the production team, they then shared stories, experiences and honest opinions about their work environment and explained their relationships with the chosen pieces, offering us precious testimonies that helped shape the structure and storyboard each episode beforehand. Then, for months, they hospitably allowed our cameras to follow their daily work routine.

Above everything else, “In Our Care” is a filmographic document about the purest forms of enjoying art, through casual, sensorial and deep personal appreciations. What makes each of these people, who look at these pieces every day, maintain such everlasting esteem about those paintings, sculptures and ceramic pieces? Our goal is to share the many answers we got to that question.