Spaces of Defamiliarisation 1: Chile’s Museo Histórico Nacional

Under the stewardship of a new director, the historian Sofía Correa Sutil, from the mid-1990s Chile’s Museo Histórico Nacional (National Historical Museum) in the capital Santiago began to revise its presentation of national history. As a result of these critical efforts, Joanna Crow appraised the museum's gallery concerning ‘Chile’s First Inhabitants’ as a more inclusive contact zone.[1] However, Crow remarked, the labels there continued to use the past tense, and in the museum’s own reflection a few years later on Correa Sutil's modernisation project, one contributor averred that ‘the tiniest room is for the indigenous world, which is not shown in all its diversity and complexity’.[2a] Yet another observed: ‘The history [the museum] represents did not seem to me to be the history of Chile; it is rather the history of Santiago and its institutional milestones. It is not the history of a people or of its indigenous minorities, or its regions or its place in the continent’.[2b] This view echoed a centralist bias that one of the museum’s researchers remarked upon as recently as 2018, who also stated that the First Inhabitants gallery was still largely unchanged, apart from the addition of Rapa Nui.[3]

While labels in the gallery concerned with 'Colonial Society' inform visitors how Spanish, Creoles and indigenous and mixed-race persons coexisted in the colonial period,[4] thereby recognising cultural hybridity and racial diversity, explanations are absent. A respectful narrative conceals a problematic history, for the very same hybridity and diversity bore tragic social realities widely discussed in recent historical narratives of the colonial and early independence periods. Similarly, the 'Liberal Order' gallery tells a story of territorial expansion, referring to Chile’s War of the Pacific against Bolivia and Peru (1879–1882) and the Occupation of Araucanía (1861–1883). Surprisingly, for the latter there is no reference to the indigenous population or violence, although the occupation led, with the ensuing subjugation of Mapuche, to significant loss of life and the impoverishment of living conditions, which continued long after the uprising.[5] Here, too, is the museum's history partial: an apparently matter-of-fact narrative of expansion ignores significant personal and social consequences.[6]

Effects on visitors

‘All collections […] are involved in organizing an exchange between the fields of the visible and the invisible which they establish […] What can be seen on display is viewed as valuable and meaningful because of the access it offers to a realm of significance which cannot itself be seen. [… C]ollections only function in this manner for those who possess the appropriate socially-coded ways of seeing […] which allow the objects on display to be not just seen but seen through to establish some communion with the invisible to which they beckon.’[7]

Refracting Tony Bennett’s theory of visibility, we understand that curators negotiate between what they intend to show with how they hope their publics will see it, using material objects to ‘beckon’—or rather conjure—a story which exceeds their contextualisation in the museum. Visitors then confront displays, interpreting what they see to find the 'invisible' story. While intelligibility necessitates compartmentalising and thematising history for visitors, those processes inevitably affect chronological flow and, in the absence of complicating details, may cause the themes they present to be taken for truths. For instance, the ‘Liberal Order’ arguably stands as a stably positive phenomenon, and visitors must possess an historical consciousness not to see events like the Occupation of Araucanía as terminal. Although some visitors may indeed possess this knowledge, the museography ought more readily to emphasise the necessity of a critical mode of historical perception both to endorse and fortify such a way of seeing and enable visitors to conjure Bennett’s ‘invisible’.

Spaces of defamiliarisation

To address lacunae in the permanent exhibition, the museum introduced a project called Experiments with the Collections (Ejercicios de Colecciones). The first of these was ‘The Image of Contemporary Mapuche’, a commissioned series of photographs depicting Mapuche youths removing traditional outer clothing to reveal how their typical clothes resemble any other Chilean youth’s.[8] Another initiative, in 2017, appealed to Chilean territory in its entirety including Easter Island to identify the most distinctive features of each region as defined locally.[9] Such museological decisions prioritised lived, vibrant realities, historically wanting in representations of indigenous populations, and demonstrated a curatorial ambition to refract ‘First Inhabitants’ as, say, ‘First Inhabitants and Continuing Actors in the Chilean Nation’.

I isolate the Ejercicio to exemplify how the museum operates spaces of defamiliarisation, by which I mean spaces intended to create experiences to alter visitors’ perceptions and preconceptions.[10] The photographs of phased undressing undo and remix identity, as we see two youths both visibly identifiable in traditional Mapuche clothing and visibly unidentifiable as Mapuche. Incidentally, apart from the girl’s given name (Rayén), it is impossible to allege from the models’ names that they are Mapuche. More than crediting the models, including names which signify ambiguously may also contribute to an effect of defamiliarisation, as visitors encounter bodies which blend indigenous–traditional and so-called mainstream sartorial conventions and European and Mapuche names. Furthermore, an accompanying exhibition leaflet bore a word search of everyday words adopted from Mapudungun into Spanish, highlighting the contribution of Mapuche worldviews to contemporary Chilean discourse.[11]

Within the broader museal context, this Ejercicio and its museography by ‘seek[ing] to vex [tensionar: lit. make tense] and question[ing] the current exhibition’[12] explicitly aim to engender discomfort, an affective reaction, as a means of educating visitors. Confronting difference, visitors are encouraged to interrogate their attitudes towards and reflect upon continuities between themselves and persons they might see as other. Such a proposal may perhaps contribute to realising Correa Sutil’s vision for the museum as a site for emphasising the ‘essential integration of indigenous peoples in national history’.[13]

[1] Joanna Crow, ‘Narrating the nation: Chile’s Museo Histórico Nacional’, in: National Identities, 11:2 (2009), 109–26 (p. 117).

[2a–b] Crow, ‘Narrating’, p. 119; Museo Histórico Nacional, Reflexión y Diálogo para un Nuevo Guión(Santiago de Chile: Museo Histórico Nacional, 2013), p. 149.

[3] Researcher interview (April 2018).

[4] Museo Histórico Nacional, Guía del visitante (visitors’ pamphlet).

[5] e.g. Mapuche numbered 150,000 before the war and 111,000 afterwards, and for almost 20 years after the last major uprising in November 1881 the army fed thousands of Mapuche who could not procure their own sustenance (Patricia Richards, Race and the Chilean Miracle: Neoliberalism, Democracy, and Indigenous Rights (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013), p. 40).

[6] The researcher unequivocally qualified the occupation ‘the war of conquest over Mapuche territory’ (interview).

[7] Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 35.

[8] Museo Histórico Nacional, ‘Ejercicio de Colecciones No. 1: La Imagen Mapuche Contemporánea’ (Online: 9 June 2016) http://www.museohistoriconacional.cl/618/w3-article-62704.html?_noredirect=1 [Accessed: 24 May 2020].

[9] Researcher interview.

[10] This idea was inspired by my reading of Alison Landsberg’s notion of ‘prosthetic memories’ (Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2004)).

[11] Museo Histórico Nacional, ‘Ejercicio de Colecciones No. 1’ (website).

[12] Ibid.

[13] Sofia Correa Sutil (ed.), Proyecto modernización del Museo Histórico Nacional (Santiago: Museo Histórico Nacional, 1994), p. 17, in: Crow, ‘Narrating’, p. 117.