The exhibition is a success, for the visitors of this prestigious institution -in pre-pandemic times, about six million a year- and for the Peruvians who enjoy the echoes that arrive from London, just after its bicentennial as a republic and in full institutional political turmoil, with a president of the nation, Pedro Castillo, teacher and trade unionist, who surprised with his electoral victory last June and today seeks to stabilize this powerful country in pre-Columbian and viceregal times.
If we were to imagine a selection of archaic testimonies from that Andean country to be exhibited in the British Museum, the Inca culture would come to mind in the first place, but the exhibition goes much further, it extends over 3000 years - we would say from around 1500 BC, until the arrival of the Spaniards-, going to the towns that preceded them, among them the so-called Chavín, Paracas, Nasca, Moche, Wari and Chimú, inhabitants of a diverse territory that climbs above the 6000 meters high on the snowy peaks of the Andes, it goes deep into the Amazon jungle, runs through one of the roughest deserts in the universe and travels along the Pacific coast whose waters are lavish in food resources. Of course, the traces of the Incas are also in the exhibition, but it is worth understanding that they built their civilization in a very short period - their empire collapsed without reaching a century and a half of existence -, measured in the time of the human occupation in the Peruvian region, whose first steps are located beyond 15,000 years.
And it is striking that it was necessary to reach the third decade of the 21st century for the British Museum -one of the most important institutions in the world- to organize an exhibition dedicated to these cultures that left authentic treasures as testimony of their lives at its own headquarters. and deaths. (1) The exhibition script is the work of the Peruvian curator Cecilia Pardo Grau and her British counterpart Jago Cooper-curator of the Americas at the MB-, both engaged in a fantastic challenge: reflecting through a selection of objects -in their most preserved in the London institution - the complexity and wonders of these past South American cultures.
To learn about the details of the exhibition, we interviewed Cecilia Pardo Grau, who was selected by the host institution in the days prior to the arrival of Covid 19. “I traveled to London in February 2020 - I had studied there - and returned to Lima where I was working at the MALI (Lima Art Museum), to prepare everything and return to England in April, but the pandemic meant that we had to change what was planned; We started the work remotely, selecting the pieces preserved in the British Museum, although the collection was very little analyzed. I finally arrived in October, with the time very advanced. We had already developed a good part of the script - we had resolved that the Inca culture would have a lesser presence than expected - and in order for the sample to be representative, we incorporated a batch of pieces that were found in Peru, which traveled to be exhibited”.
“The room”, the Peruvian curator continues, “has almost 400 square meters and it was necessary to find those elements that would allow us a dialogue between Western and Andean times; that with a linear evolution towards progress, and that of the cultures represented, in a parallel, cyclical time, a continuous living, dying and being reborn. In addition, we wanted to address the legacy of those cultures in present-day Peru and put the millennial testimonies and their scientific interpretations in dialogue with the voices of the current inhabitants who continue these traditions. We see it in the production of textiles and also in agricultural work”.
An exhibition, a trip
The director of the British Museum, Hartwig Fischer, maintains that crossing the entrance doors to the institution, “is always taking the first step on a journey, and with this exhibition we invite visitors to travel through the history of one of the most captivating regions of the world. The scale of the generous loan of antique objects from museums in Peru is unprecedented and is a historic opportunity to see them here in the UK. The fascinating variety of material on display collectively challenges perceptions of how the world can be seen and understood”. Hartwig Fischer immediately thanked PROMPERU -the Peruvian Promotion Commission for Exports and Tourism (2) - for their support, which made it possible.