Yesterday marked four weeks since the devastating fire that consumed Brazil’s 200-year old National Museum. The past month has been filled with accounts of the museum’s losses and speculation about the systematic problems that led to the fire. The fire has been described as a “global tragedy” but now it’s time to consider how a “global recovery” can take shape.
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| Photograph capturing the fire at the National Museum of Brazil. Source. |
What happened?
On September 2, 2018 an enormous fire broke out at Brazil’s National Museum in Rio de Janeiro. Officials estimated that the fire destroyed 90% of the museum’s collection of 20 million artifacts. There has been an outpouring of anger and disappointment across the world in the wake of the fire. Although the exact cause of the fire is unknown, many blame the government of Brazil for neglecting the country’s cultural institutions and letting the museum fall into disrepair. Brazil’s National Development Bank was in the process of disbursing a loan to the museum, but the funds to provide an “adequate fire safety system” came too late to save the museum.
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| Photograph of the exterior of the National Museum of Brazil before the fire. Source. |
What was lost?
The museum’s staff are still trying to account for the losses in the collection, but the outlook is bleak for the majority of the artifacts. The museum had diverse collections including artifacts from Brazil’s Indigenous cultures, an Ancient Egypt collection, and artifacts related to anthropology and archaeology – including 11,500 year-old “Luzia,” the oldest human fossil discovered in the Americas. Many members of Brazil’s Indigenous communities have expressed the tragic loss of the museum’s Indigenous collection. The Indigenous collection included audio recordings of Indigenous leaders who have since died, and writings of languages that are now extinct. The collection represented a tangible connection to history, which has now been irrevocably severed.
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| Photograph of the National Museum of Brazil's display of "Luzia," an 11,500 year-old skull that was used to create a digital reconstruction of her face. Luzia was lost in the fire. Source. |
Where does recovery begin?
It is difficult to imagine a way to “rebuild” a museum that has lost such a significant piece of their collection, but there are several efforts to assist the museum. The physical rebuilding of the museum will be extremely costly, and Brazil’s government is in the process of seeking local and international assistance to fund the project. Funding the physical rebuild is one problem, but questions remain: How do you begin “recovering” a collection with few remaining traces? How can the global community support the National Museum?
“The [University of Toronto Museum Studies program] has sent a letter of support and an offer of assistance to the National Museum in Brazil,” states Dr. Cara Krmpotich, the Director of the University of Toronto Museum Studies Program. “We are approaching the situation from both top down, and bottom up, offering assistance based on needs identified by museum and scholarly colleagues in Brazil.” According to Krmpotich, assistance may come in the form of digital transcription here in Toronto, or skilled labour on the ground in Rio. The faculty will take their lead from the staff of the museum, who are likely in the process of mobilizing a strategy in the wake of the fire.
In addition to financial and scholarly efforts to help the museum, there have been several initiatives to digitally “reconstruct” the collection. Wikipedia recently launched a crowd-sourcing initiative to encourage the global community to upload photos to Wikimedia of any artifacts from the National Museum collection.
There were over 20 million objects inside the #MuseuNacional. Did you take a photo of any of them? Help us preserve the memories of as many as we can and add them to @wikicommons. Here's how to do it from your desktop: pic.twitter.com/jMwbj15Kg3— Wikipedia (@Wikipedia) September 4, 2018
Similar digital recovery projects have sprung up across the internet, but is this the answer to large-scale restoration? Krmpotich, and many other museum professionals, would prefer to hear what the museum wants “on their terms” rather than follow the lead of a 3rd party platform. Another notable project is underway at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. The students of the University’s Museum Studies program are gathering images, videos, documents, and drawings of exhibits and artifacts in order to create a digital archive. The Federal University was in charge of the museum’s operations and collections, so the students are extremely close to situation.
The restoration of the National Museum is the priority in the wake of this tragedy, but the fire begs the question of how we can implement policies to protect the structural integrity of museums across the world. We may assume that the fire in Brazil couldn't happen here in Canada, but as Krmpotich states, “we shouldn’t be so hasty to assume this is a problem in other places.”
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