Historia Natural

2012-2011 The Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos administers the only Natural History Museum in Lima. This institution is under the supervision of the Ministry of Education of Peru. In the search to maintain the most remarkable possible objectivity in the frontal record of the condition of the museographic space, the photographic point of view of Historia Natural (Spanish for Natural History) marks an attentive and distant visual language. The work highlights the need for more adequate development of spaces related to different cultural manifestations in Peru. The common denominator of the infrastructure of exhibition spaces in Peru is the adaptation of existing spaces (often improvised) initially designed to satisfy other needs. The attention to resources and logistics only sometimes allows places to be designed with the appropriate parameters and requirements to meet the exhibition’s purposes. Through photographs of the work, we seek to demonstrate the stillness between the museography space and its respective exhibition standards, thus contrasting with the exhibition bodies themselves in the search for a reflection on the exhibition forms and the study of the natural world. Similarly, the exhibition objects spark intrigue and curiosity. Speculations and questions arise about the inertia of what, at some point in the past, was a living being, which is now seen as an exhibition object, a statue. The museum sculptures, even though they are dead, simulate eternal life and the perpetual body, and they are still victims of the deterioration generated by the corrosion generated by the elements of nature. Natural History documents the austere conditions of the public cultural apparatus of Peru but also mirrors the apathy of spectators. This indifference, reflected in our cultural history, becomes an analogy of our innate semblance. Historyscovery of objects and space is a semblance of a social characteristic- a testament to austerity and indifference that calls for change.