The Cabinet of Bureaucratic Wonders

The »Cabinet of Bureaucratic Wonders« (CBW) is a collection of mundane, yet wondrous artifacts found in public sector facilities and co-curated by public servants in Brazil and in the United States. At once an institution, an archive, and an intervention, the CBW draws from design anthropology methods to invite participants to productive encounters with bureaucratic artifacts through interviews, cultural probes, workshops, and site-specific installations. This paper focuses on the CBW instantiation with the Brazilian National School of Public Administration to discuss broader contributions in revealing the agency of sociomaterial infrastructures and engaging with public institutions as porous sites of transformation.