Collections and objects in dialogue with the exhibition languages of the anthropological museum

Abstract

Anthropological museums over the world have been making important changes in the last decades, transforming their expositions and interpretations about “exotic” and “primitive” objects and cultures in other points of view. Among the different methods used by museums, we can see a common way to represent institutional old times: the “cabinet” of curiosities from the 16th and 17th centuries. Curators show parts of human bodies, bones, strange animals and objects from collections of research expeditions and trips. These objects form part of an interpretation about people and cultures, and about the history of museums and anthropology as a discipline when put together in the same exhibition. This paper presents the Sala de Orígenes del Museu, or “cabinet” of curiosities of Dr. Velasco at the National Anthropology Museum in Madrid, as a research project about the objects that, nowadays, have been shown at the galleries. This room presents the museum and its collections to the audience, exhibiting the first group of pieces accumulated by the founder of MNA. The main objective of this paper is to understand how this museum uses these collections to tell its own history. The Sala de Orígenes works like a metaphor or a way to represent how the “cabinet” of Dr. Velasco was in the end of the 19th century in Spain, its importance to science and research at this moment, and tries to give sense to the maintenance of the museum today.