Ten Latin American authors worked with SDCELAR curators to write stories inspired by items in the British Museum collection in a collaborative project with Hay Festival International.

Rocío Vera-Flores, PhD candidate at the Leiden University, visited London and describes her experience with the Tepetlaoztoc Codex.

Look at these contemporary codices mentioned in our podcast ‘Made in Latin America’, episode 7.

Many of the current Latin American carnivals “commemorate local historical narratives about Indigenous, Spanish, African and other ethnic identities, but at the same time they create a space to raise issues that have an impact on race relations and cultural expression in the present”.

Edited by Laura Osorio Sunnucks and Jago Cooper, ‘Mapping a New Museum’ showcases projects in Latin America supported by SDCELAR and seeks to rethink the museum’s role in today’s politically conscious world.

‘Saa Ñu’ú’ (Clay Birds) is the artwork conceived by Martínez Valderrama and it combines sounds from the landscape, ancestral instruments and images of the Mesoamerican territory to create a ‘soundscape’ composition of the region through his experimental art practice.

Created by SDCELAR and its collaborators, ‘Made in Latin America’ hosts stories and new interpretations of remarkable collections from the British Museum. ​

Miriam Rudolph is part of the collaborative project ‘Collection, Mission, Colonisation: Encounters and Entangled Histories from the Chaco‘ carried out with SDCELAR. 

On Tuesday, May 17th, Afro-Bolivian artist Sharon Pérez performed ‘The mask is looking at us’ in the Great Court at the British Museum. Watch here an extract and her explanation about the artistic exercise.

The photography competition “Nature, society and climate” aims to visibilise the climate emergency through photographic art.

Nereida Apaza Mamani is a poet and visual artist who has lived between the cities of Arequipa and Puno, in Peru. This artistic book called ‘La Diablada’ (2019) is inspired by Apaza’s experience of taking part in the La fiesta de la Virgen de la Candelaria.

Osvaldo Pitoe, Jorge Carema, Efacio Álvarez, Marcos Ortiz and Esteban Klassen, from an Indigenous artist collective in the Chaco, along with Miriam Rudolph and Lanto’oy’ Unruh, will present a series of works that are an outcome of a project with SDCELAR for the first time.

Osvaldo Pitoe, Jorge Carema, Efacio Álvarez, Marcos Ortiz and Esteban Klassen, a collective of indigenous artists from the Chaco, are part of the project ‘Collection, Mission, Colonisation: Encounters and entangled Histories from the Chaco’.

Lanto’oy’ Unruh is an artist from the Enlhet Ya’alve-Saanga community, in the Paraguayan Chaco and is part of the Paraguayan project ‘Collection, mission, colonization: encounters and intertwined stories from the Chaco’.

In January 2022 at the International Hay Festival held in Cartagena, Colombia, the museologists Nicola Levell, Cristina Lleras, Anthony Shelton and Laura Osorio Sunnucks discussed the relationship between literature and anthropology.

Miriam Rudolph is part of the Paraguayan project ‘Collection, Mission, Colonisation: Encounters and Entangled Histories from the Chaco’. Here you can read her statement and explore part of her process.

Shelved among the collections in storage at the British Museum are around six hundred items from the Chaco in Paraguay, South America. This region, although undergoing rapid deforestation, is not very well known internationally.