MUSEU AFRO BRASIL: DIFFICULTIES AND CHALLENGES OF THE COLLECTION DOCUMENTATION 1 Guilherme Lopes VIEIRA 2 Juliana Ribeiro da Silva BEVILACQUA 3 ABSTRACT This paper aims to discuss the difficulties and challenges of the documentation of Museu Afro Brasil’s collection, a museological institution which is peculiar by the specificity of its curatorial philosophy and also by the historical formation of its collection, strictly related to the trajectory of its founder. To illustrate some of these difficulties, we will take as a case study a work entitled “Iemanjá”, a sculpture in wood from the 19 th Century elaborated by an unknown popular artist, that even inserted in a museological context, has continued to incorporate material elements that are extrinsic to the work, but directly connected to a devotional function, which has been given to it already in the musealization context. Keywords: collection management, curator, collector, musealisation, Iemanjá INTRODUCTION Museu Afro Brasil, located in Sao Paulo (Brazil), is a public institution founded in 2004, from the particular collection of the artist, curator and collector Emanoel Araujo (1940). The collection, consisting primarily of works that reveal the contribution of black 1 This study of case was presented on the annual conference of CIDOC, the International Committee for Documentation of ICOM, held from 5th -10th of September 2015 in New Delhi, India with title "Documenting Diversity: Collections, Catalogues and Context". This study fits on the theme "Strategies and policies for Documenting the diversity of culture". 2 Documentalist - Museu Afro Brasil, São Paulo, Brazil. 3 Historian – Phd student, Universidade de São Paulo.