By: Lizi Sánchez
Contributors: Santiago Valencia Parra, Anna Szulfer, Louise de Mello and James Hamill
In January 2025, supported by the Santo Domingo Centre for Latin American Research (SDCELAR), I began a six-month artistic research project at the British Museum. I aimed to engage with the overlooked layers behind the scenes of the museum’s collection to rethink how memory and histories are constructed within the institution, and to respond to these findings through visual storytelling. With the assistance of Santiago Valencia Parra, Digital Curator at SDCELAR, and James Hamill, Curator of Pictorial and Collection Research Enquiries, I was able to access documents and photographs held at the Anthropology Library and Research Centre, as well as the Museum’s Central Archive.
Research at the British Museum archives. Photos: Lizi Sánchez & Santiago Valencia Parra.
During my initial visits, I was introduced to Anna Szulfer, a PhD student at the Sainsbury Research Unit for the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas (University of East Anglia) and the British Museum. Her research examines the histories and provenance of Andean collections at the British Museum, with a focus on those formed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Through Hamil and Szulfer, I learned of the existence and location of documents tracing the British Museum’s acquisition records of a pottery collection from the industrialist and major donor Henry Van den Bergh. This collection, along with its related archives, served as the starting point for my project.
The Henry Van den Bergh pottery collection consists of 250 pottery pieces, mostly from the Moche Culture (in present-day Peru). It includes a range of ceramics, such as stirrup-spout bottles, vessels shaped like humans and animals, and containers that depict ceremonial practices. The artefacts were originally obtained by Thomas Hewitt Myring, later purchased by Henry Van den Bergh, and finally acquired by the British Museum in 1909.
Moche pottery from the Myring-Van den Bergh collections on display at the British Museum galleries. From left to right: Am1909,1218.103 (Gallery 1), Am1909,1218.96 (Gallery 1), Am1909,1218.6 (Gallery 1), and Am1909,1218.119 (Gallery 24). Photo: Santiago Valencia Parra.
Collection History: Myring & Van den Bergh
“In 1909, Thomas Hewitt Myring brought to London a large collection of Peruvian antiquities. The collection was widely advertised, sparking the interest of scholars as well as the general public alike.
Sir Charles Hercules Read, then Keeper of the Department of British and Medieval Antiquities and Ethnography, was closely involved with negotiating the acquisition for the Museum. In the end, Myring’s collection was bought by Henry Van den Bergh, a Dutch businessman, art collector, and major donor to London’s museums. In December 1909 Van den Bergh in turn donated 250 of the pottery vessels to the British Museum via the National Art Collections Fund.
The British Museum currently houses vast collections from the Andean region of South America, many of which have, through time, become disassociated from their collecting histories or whose provenance is scarce. My ongoing doctoral research traces the collecting histories of collections such as Myring’s, which were acquired by the British Museum in the early 20thcentury. By navigating the institutional history of archive records and through engaging with the materiality of the objects, I encounter stories of collecting practices, follow the networks of collectors, and seek to unpack the various meanings that Andean objects were imbued with as they moved through different contexts. As an ongoing project, my work reconnects the Museum’s collections with their stories materialised in paper records, and seeks to contextualise them within both institutional and wider global currents. Often fragmentary, these illustrate the complex, multifaceted, and diverse engagements between people and material objects.”
Anna Szulfer, PhD researcher at the Sainsbury Research Unit for the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas (University of East Anglia) and the British Museum
Pre-Columbian pottery vessels of the the British Museum collections.
© The Trustees of the British Museum
A series of letters, telegrams, and receipts preserved in the archive document the transactions and correspondence surrounding the collection’s acquisition. The archive also contains newspaper clippings from the time when Myring brought the pieces to the UK, in which he offers his account of how he obtained them in Peru. Additionally, the archive contains brochures from past exhibitions, as well as black-and-white photographs of the objects.
I approached these paper materials as ethnographic artefacts that reveal the cultural and institutional practices behind the acquisition of the collection. My interest extended beyond the factual content of the documents to the human traces embedded within them: the handwriting, letterheads, stamps, footnotes, and marginalia that reflect the subtleties of institutional and interpersonal decision-making. I was equally drawn to the photographic documentation, examining not only the fronts showing the Moche objects, but also the backs, marked with British Museum copyright stamps and archival annotations.
Research at the British Museum archives. Photo: Santiago Valencia Parra.
For this project, I focused on tracing the provenance documentation of the collection at a 1:1 scale, using carbon copy paper as a recording technology. The inked sheets act both as a membrane that filters and as a surface that registers information. As a starting point, I worked from seven pages of the accession ledger Register of Antiquities, Volume 2 (dated 21 May 1907 and 7 April 1913), which log the entry of the Moche pottery pieces into the British Museum. Using the ledger’s format as a template, I created seven drawings, or “archive rewritings”, each measuring 32 × 41 cm.
Over this initial layer, I meticulously traced all the material found in the archive documenting the collection’s acquisition and institutional framing. As I transcribed them, an image emerged on the carbon copy paper through the emptied lines where the ink had been scratched away, producing a mirrored, ghost-like palimpsest. The drawings are intended to be displayed backlit, allowing the voids and impressions to become visible.
Lizi Sánchez’ carbon-copy drawings.
© Lizi Sánchez.
This project invites reflection on the construction of memory and the production of knowledge within the museum. Archival systems tend to shape a specific vision of the world through space–time frameworks that reflect and reinforce the perspectives they uphold. The British Museum’s record-keeping follows the functional logic of the institution. By contrast, in my carbon copy paper drawings, the archive is transformed into a crafted artefact where the imagery of Moche pottery intersects with, disrupts, and merges into the many layers of documentation and registration. From this interplay, a hybrid memory emerges—one shaped by collisions, absences, and fractures.
The written records I examined primarily serve to document the process of acquisition, offering little insight into the creation of the artefacts themselves. Any information predating their institutional entry is found instead in the craftsmanship, finish, and visual language of the objects— traces of meaning embedded in their making, before they were owned, categorised, or displayed.
My artistic research method is therefore different from that of an academic researcher. Rather than seeking answers, I intended to pose new questions through material inquiry. By retracing the Van den Bergh collection’s provenance trail, I asked: What forms of power and visibility are encoded into the archive? While these inquiries draw on academic work, such as that of PhD researcher Anna Szulfer, the outcome of my artistic approach did not yield a definitive conclusion based on the findings; instead, it invited new readings and narratives, favouring layered and fragmented histories.
Lizi Sánchez’ carbon-copy drawings.
© Lizi Sánchez.
During my visits to the British Museum, I also met Catherine Hirst, trustee of Bexhill Museum and doctoral researcher, who is currently tracing the acquisition of Pre-Columbian objects across the UK. Through this connection, I gained access to Moche pottery and related records from the Myring collection held at Bexhill Museum. This encounter opened the possibility of expanding the scope of my research beyond the British Museum, allowing me to explore how the histories embedded in these objects intersect with multiple other collection stories across the UK.
In parallel, over several years, I have been developing large-scale carbon paper drawings based on the International Astronomical Union’s system of 88 constellation maps. In these works, I trace and reconfigure personal archives, breaking apart fixed systems and structures that shape my biography and everyday life. Although I have long used carbon copy paper as a method to explore memory on a personal scale, my project at the British Museum marks the first time I have applied it to institutional memory. This new line of inquiry opens crossings between personal and collective memory, enabling me to blur boundaries and bring my own stories into dialogue with broader historical and geopolitical narratives.
Lizi Sánchez’ carbon-copy drawings.
© Lizi Sánchez.
Lizi Sánchez was born in Lima, Peru, and has lived and worked in London since 2005. Her interests revolve around how processes, contexts, and intentions shape memory and transform the meaning of language. Embracing uncertainty and materiality, her practice invites open-ended readings of various communication systems and codes. Sánchez has exhibited internationally in galleries and institutions such as Instituto Cultural Peruano Norteamericano, Peru; Whitechapel Gallery, UK; Studio Voltaire, UK; Drawing Room, UK; Walker Art Gallery, UK, among others. Her work is featured in Remains-Tomorrow: Themes in Contemporary Latin American Abstraction, edited by Cecilia Fajardo Hill (Hatje Cantz, Dec 2022). She holds an MFA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College, London, UK (2007).
Publications related to women’s and maternal health with Wixárika communities by the author of this exhibition
Gamlin, Jennie B. (2013)
Shame as a barrier to health seeking among indigenous Huichol migrant labourers: An interpretive approach of the “violence continuum” and “authoritative knowledge”
Social Science and Medicine 97 75-81
Gamlin, Jennie B. (2023)
Wixárika Practices of Medical Syncretism: An Ontological Proposal for Health in the Anthropocene
Medical Anthropology Theory 10 (2) 1-26
Gamlin, Jennie B. (2020)
“You see, we women, we can’t talk, we can’t have an opinion…”. The coloniality of gender and childbirth practices in Indigenous Wixárika families
Social Science and Medicine 252, 112912
Jennie Gamlin and David Osrin (2020)
Preventable infant deaths, lone births and lack of registration in Mexican indigenous communities: health care services and the afterlife of colonialism
Ethnicity and Health 25 (7)
Jennie Gamlin and Seth Holmes (2018)
Preventable perinatal deaths in indigenous Wixárika communities: an ethnographic study of pregnancy, childbirth and structural violence BMC
Pregnancy and Childbirth 18 (Article number 243) 2018
Gamlin, Jennie B. and Sarah J Hawkes (2015)
Pregnancy and birth in an Indigenous Huichol community: from structural violence to structural policy responses
Culture, health and sexuality 17 (1)
