Projects

Projects

String map showing spiritual connections among landscape features of the Wiwa territory

Photo by Celia del Pilar Paez Canro

Projects supported and developed by SDCELAR.

SDCELAR works together with research partners and community collaborators in Latin America and the Caribbean. Our projects promote transdisciplinary approaches and plurivocal perspectives to interpreting and engaging with collections, ranging from heritage initiatives, artistic residencies, and scientific analysis to collaborative documentation, archival digitisation and 3D modelling.

These pages have been collaboratively conceived in order to share the Centre’s past and ongoing projects.

Your selections:

Species of the River: Yaqui (Yoeme) communities in Mexico and the United States

‘Species of the River’ is a collaborative research project with Yaqui architect Selina Martínez (Arizona) to examine questions of territorial identity, dispossession, community memory and storytelling, and the connection between culture and design in Yaqui communities on both sides of the present-day US/Mexico border.

Ateliê-Lavrado: A Wapichana Residency

This SDCELAR project and artistic residency grows from a research collaboration with Wapichana artist Gustavo Caboco and historian and teacher Roseane Cadete from Brazil, who visited the British Museum in Summer 2023. Gustavo and Roseane co-created a range of practices and gatherings around Wapichana materials from the collection that constitute the Ateliê-Lavrado.

Writers in the Archives of The British Museum

This new collaboration with Hay Festival explores the paper trails of Latin America and the Caribbean at the British Museum through a lesser-known collection of ‘Ethnographic Documents’. The anthology Explorers, Dreamers and Thieves: Writers in the Archives of the British Museum, will be published in English and Spanish.

Digital exhibition: The Coloniality of Gender and Sexuality

Based on archives, bibliography, testimonies and photography, ‘The Coloniality of Gender and Sexuality: How the Intimate Lives of Wixárika People were Changed Forever’ showcases the impact of colonialism in these North-Western Mexico communities.

Tributaries: the Chocó collection and Afro-Colombia

Afro-Colombian writer Velia Vidal has worked on the Chocó collection, which gathers about 200 objects collected by Brian Moser and Donald Tayler in the 1960s. Here she describes the collaborative project that addresses topics such as racism, colonialism, and the way ‘the other’ is depicted within anthropological and cultural processes.

Blackwell School: A History of Latinx Segregation in Texas

Located in Marfa, Texas, a museum in the former Blackwell school building tells the story of discrimination and struggle of the Mexican migrants in the United States. Gretel Enck, the museum Director, describes the aim of the project.

‘The mask is looking at us’: Afrodescendant representation in Bolivian carnival

Sharon Pérez focuses on creating visibility for the Afrodescendant communities in Bolivia through her artistic practice. By painting portraits, on rusting metals or daily-use furniture such as chairs, window frames or doors, large-scale installations and peformance she seeks to break the circulation of stereotypes of Afrodescendant bodies.

Untold Microcosms: Latin American Writers in the British Museum

A new international collaboration between the SDCELAR and the Hay Festival will inspire new stories based on items from the Americas collection that are not on display in the galleries.

Collection, Mission, Colonisation: Encounters and Entangled Histories from the Chaco

Artists, researchers and curators from the Paraguayan Chaco are exploring the ethnographic collection from the Enxet Sur at the British Museum. These objects were obtained by the missionaries Wilfrid Barbrooke Grubb and Seymour Hawtrey at the end of the 19th century and they have never been exhibited.

[EXHIBITION] Immersive exhibition brings the sounds of Mexican landscapes to London

For the first time in the UK, Jorge Martínez Valderrama will present ‘Saa Ñu’ú’ (Birds/Clay), an immersive experience that will transport visitors to La Mixteca, Mexico through a combination of experimental sound and video art. Entrance is free and the exhibition will run from September 3 until October 5.

Maya Blue: Painting from the Past in the Present

The clay-dye composite 'Maya Blue' was made in Mesoamerica from as early as the third century CE until shortly after the conquest of the region by Spain in the 16th century. Codices, pottery, wall paintings and sculptures were painted with this pigment and today, Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists are recreating it using new practices.

‘Ancient Writing, Contemporary Voices’ – Event videos

The event 'Ancient Writing, Contemporary Voices: Decolonising the Mesoamerican Quincentenary', held digitally by the British Museum between June 21-25 2021, critically commemorated 500 years since the fall of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan, in what is now Mexico City, to Spanish conquerors.

Birds/Clay: Digital Artist Residency at the British Museum

Jorge Martínez Valderrama is a sound artist and inaugural digital resident of the Santo Domingo Centre of Excellence for Latin American Research. He presented 'Saa Ñu’ú' (Birds/Clay) for the first time to the public through a digital open studio via Zoom in June 2021.

[EVENT] Ancient Writing, Contemporary Voices: Decolonising the Mesoamerican Quincentenary

Matching-up the Muisca past and present: Virtual cultural heritage

The British Museum holds more than 200 objects that are classified as Muisca or Chibcha. The vast majority of them has been kept in storage since their acquisition into the museum’s collection. The direct descendants of the Muisca have never visited the museum or asked for access to these objects.

Lands for the “retaking”: Pataxó cultural recovery

For a very long time, the Pataxó indigenous culture from Northeast Brazil was dormant, invisible and forgotten, as the simple fact of being indigenous was a trigger for discrimination and persecution. But since the re-democratization process in Brazil, which began in the 1980s, indigenous people have started a recovery movement that we have called “the retaking”.

Moving Beyond: Using New Methods to Assess Environmental Change in Northwestern Guyana

Little is known of the prehistoric environment of Northwestern Guyana. Although we presume a degree of environmental constancy in the last 10,000 years, few studies address climate and landscape change during this period.

The Serrania La Lindosa: New archaeological sites for the colonisation and settlements of the Colombian Amazon

The last major global expansion of Homo sapiens sapiens was the colonisation of the Americas, an event that happened between 18,000 and 15,000 years ago.

“Bëngbe Benacheng” (Our paths): Collaborative Cultural Heritage Management with the Camëntsá People

The material culture of the indigenous peoples of Latin America tends to be exhibited as trophies within museums. Objects are decontextualized and desacralized. Our research uses artistic and ethnographic practices that are co-produced with the Camëntsá people to reveal their "unofficial" and contested heritage.

Gaining insight: Indigenous positions towards digitisation and open access

The British Museum has collections that interest all kinds of people, in particular those who want to learn about world cultures. However, not all the objects that are at the museum are on display: There are ethnographic and archaeological collections from the Americas, especially from Indigenous communities from Latin America and the Caribbean, which are kept in storage.

Barranca Larga Community Rural Museum: A Museum that Visits the People

Itig’a: connecting Munduruku past and present

Caminos del Agua: “Cerro de los Viejos” Archaeological Landscape

Mapping Agûkabuk in Munduruku Traditional Territories, southern Brazilian Amazonia

Malocas and the Annual Cycle

Chile, colonial practices in the past and present

Patria Invisible

Contrapunto. The living footprints of Afro-Peruvian zapateo

Exploring Kalinago Masculinities and Gender-relations in Waitukubuli (Dominica)

The Last Peanut Farmers of Palenque: Preserving Women’s Agricultural Practices & Labor Songs

KAANCAB: Clay Archive

Digital repatriation of biocultural collections: connecting scientific and indigenous communities of knowledge in Amazonia

Under the Shelter: Archaeology in the Caves of Ruropolis, Amazonia, Brazil

Healing Words, Resistance through Indigenous Memory

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