Votive offerings

GREC — the Study Group on Cybermuseums — now twenty-two years old, was created by the late Dr. Gottfried Stockinger and, since 2006, has been coordinated by Dr. José Cláudio Alves de Oliveira and Dr. Ana Helena Delfino Duarte. It is a research group that moves across a diversity of themes, contextualizing popular culture, art, religiosity, cyberculture, and Folkcommunication, and has been carrying out studies in the iconographic, journalistic, cybercultural, museological, discursive, information science, and social memory fields.

Thus, with expanded perspectives, its researchers delve into studies that address diverse cultural heritages and encompass research that contextualizes faith and transgressions, memory and museology, folklore and anthropology, and religiosity when discussing the *ex-voto*: a testimony materialized through the act of fulfilling a vow in miracle rooms of Catholic churches and sanctuaries. This object may be seen in various forms: notes or letters, sculptures, *milagritos*, pictorial works, photographs, in vitro organs, locks of hair, CDs or DVDs, personal objects — in short, an infinity of objects that remain in the space known as the “miracle room.”

In 2024, even though all of us in the Group were deeply shaken by the sad loss of one of our researchers, Menderson Bulcão, we responded with the best we had to offer: coming together, sitting down, debating, and weaving what we present here, doing exactly what our great and unforgettable colleague always demonstrated within our Group — restlessness in study, in speech, in writing, and in debate.