Now it is difficult to imagine, even to provoke embarrassment and indignation, but at the end of the 19th century and into the 20th century, human zoos proliferated in Europe. Spain joined the trend of ethnic exhibitions in 1887, with the General Exhibition of the Philippines, which converted Retiro Park into a town of indigenous people from the Spanish colony (1566-1898). A year later, within the Barcelona Universal Exhibition of 1888, the Pavilion of the General Philippine Tobacco Company, founded by Antonio López, human beings were once again exhibited along with a series of artifacts that ended up forming part of the Museum’s collections. of the Cultures of Món.
Digging through his warehouses, the artist Domènec found a series of figurines that were initially cataloged as ritual objects but that in reality – it was discovered later – were commissioned by the organizers as souvenirs to show the Spanish public what the inhabitants of the town were like. cologne. A set of those figurines invented for exoticizing purposes are now exhibited in the Museu Etnològic i de Cultures del Món within Reincarnamientos. A bold and pertinent exhibition in which ten artists give new life to some of the ethnological artifacts preserved by the museum, redefining them and offering critical readings that connect them with the present.
Reincarnations was born from the interest of The Green Parrot, the organization founded by curator Rosa Lleó, to work from the collections that rest in the museum’s reserves, 70,000 objects distributed in two warehouses, “many of them coming from episodes of colonial violence or what is called unequal trade, which are frozen and have lost their original meaning, especially the ethnological pieces that can no longer be returned because the communities to which they belonged no longer exist or the rituals for which they were created have disappeared. . So what can we do with all that?” Lleó launched the challenge to ten artists and entrusted the design of the museography to the architect Olga Subiròs, who, challenging the conventional museography of this type of center (there are hardly any showcases here) has transformed it into a space that seems to have come from the future to be inhabited. for the works and the visitors.
The Ruta de Autor collective, formed by two Venezuelan artists and researchers, found a collection of hammocks brought from the Caribbean expeditions, vacuum packed, unused, as if they were dead, and compared them to another in which the public can rocking, very similar to the hammock that the relative of one of them brought with him when he arrived as an immigrant to Barcelona. It was his only possession, but if necessary he could hang it between two trees and have a place to sleep.
The Algerian-born artist Lydia Ourahmane has rescued orphaned, lost or forgotten objects, devoid of any type of information, only the registration number; Agnes Essonti had a reproduction made of a Gabon wooden statue labeled Her Ancestor Statuette and traveled with it to Cameroon. The Filipino Nikki Luna superimposes 20th century beads from the museum with combs designed by her in gold and diamonds, minerals that were abundant in her country before the arrival of the Spanish, to which she incorporates legends (Savage s, as the Spanish called the natives, or We build your empire).
Regina de Miquel located a view dress from La Alberca full of syncretic elements that inspired Pasolini to dress his Medea and the Taiwanese musician and activist Chenta Tsai Tseng (Putochinomaricón) draws the colors of the chinoiserie pieces from the Museu del Disseny while denounces in a video the violence suffered by migrants and dissidents online. The Italian Chiara Camoni creates a silk installation based on collective walks through Montjuïc and in the center, dominating everything, the Chilean Patricia Domínguez has installed an altar with objects that evoke multispecies relationships for the healing of contemporary liberal society.
