Project to salvage images of collection lost in fire as Brazil mourns museum
BRAZIL - While most Brazilians were still reeling from the devastating fire at the country’s National Museum last week, Luana Santos and fellow museum studies students in Rio de Janeiro had started gathering photos and videos of missing items, and even selfies taken by visitors to the vast archive.
Among the 20m items lost in the blaze were Egyptian mummies, the oldest skeleton ever found in Latin America and an irreplaceable collection of indigenous artefacts and research. But at least something could be salvaged for future generations, Santos and her friends reasoned. Within hours, their appeal went worldwide; so far, it has received 14,000 replies including videos, photos, written recollections and even drawings of favourite exhibits. “[The response] shows the importance of the archive not just a place of research and history, but as part of people’s lives,” said Santos, 28, who studies at the Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro. The group is now in discussions with the same university which ran the museum about how to use the material “to show the affection that people had for the museum”, she said. The impact of the fire and the scale of the loss reverberated globally. Unesco technicians have arrived in Rio to help recover what is left of the archive, and museums around the world have offered financial assistance. But in Brazil, it has prompted a bout of soul-searching: amid reports of museum budget cuts under successive governments and repeated warnings of fire risks at the collection, Brazilians have been asking what the tragedy said about their country and its attitude to its history. At least four important public buildings have been hit by fires since 2010. São Paulo’s innovative Museum of the Portuguese Language was destroyed in a 2015 blaze. “It is part of a process of institutional neglect in a country that does not take care of its history,” said Djamila Ribeiro, a leading academic and commentator. She said the loss of the museum’s collection of African art and Amerindian artefacts and research reflected Brazil’s ignorance of its African and indigenous heritage, and its indifference to an ignoble history of slavery and oppression. “The country looks towards Europe. The governing class and middle class think other countries are wonderful,” Ribeiro said.
(The Guardian)