Visit to Room 4

GUIDE TO CARMO MUSEUM’S ROOM 4

In Carmo Museum’s Room 4, the mummified bodies of two young Chancay Amerindians are displayed inside glass cases. They are gazed upon and photographed daily by dozens of visitors, while also causing distress and indignation to many others. Why are they here and not in the resting place chosen for them by their relatives? How were they brought here? What is the meaning of the ongoing exhibition of Indigenous bodies in a Portuguese archaeological museum, in 2018? These are some of the questions we feel the exhibition display of the Carmo Museum should address.

Room 4 pays homage to Januário Correia de Almeida, whose portrait can be seen on the wall opposite the entrance. Januário Correia de Almeida travelled through South America between 1878 and 1879 on a diplomatic mission, which resulted in the signature of trade agreements between Portugal and South-American nations. During this journey, he collected 64 artifacts from the Mochica, Chimú and Chancay cultures and four human remains. The researchers who so far have examined the records of his trip have found no information regarding the circumstances under which Januário Correia de Almeida got hold of the artifacts and human remains, nor about who unearthed them and to what end.

The two young people whose bodies are on display lived in the 16^th century North of Lima, Peru, and their culture coexisted with the Inca empire and the Spanish colonizers. Many books make claims about their “disappearance”, but they also imply that it was not a physical disappearance, but rather a loss of sight of the threads that connect this culture to present times, in a history that is intertwined with the encounter with the Incas and with the history of Spanish colonization. It is possible that there are living descendants of the Chancay among Peruvians, although history may have rendered these ties harder to scrutinize.

Until the early 20^th century, the bodies were exhibited in a space similar to a curiosity cabinet behind curtains, which were lifted only under particular circumstances. Throughout the 20^th century, the museum underwent several structural transformations, the most recent of which happened in 2001. The current exhibition design dates back to 2001. The bodies are surrounded by the Museum’s historical library, which brings together the instruments of knowledge production - Anthropology and Archaeology books, the proceedings of the Congress of the Portuguese World, among others -, and above them stands a row of representations of monarchs and members of the Portuguese Archaeological Association, prominent elderly white men depicted in oil paintings and crowned by golden frames. The layout of the room thus designs a visual hierarchy whereby the two bodies are placed on the lower level, at the point where all eyes meet. The humanity of the bodies has been made invisible by the museological apparatus, by the history written by European colonizers and by the long objectification process of people who are racialized as “non-white”. How to make humanness visible? Should we keep on gazing at all?