The Santo Domingo Centre
(2019–2025)

Our Work

Mexica-Mixtec wooden mask covered in turquoise mosaic and other precious materials. Am,St.400 ©Trustees of the British Museum 

Between 2019 and 2025, our staff conducted field research across Latin America and the Caribbean aimed at expanding our understanding of the region’s history, culture, and politics and join ongoing conversations around heritage initiatives and museum practices around the world. We built creative connections between Latin America and the British Museum’s collections from that region.

The Museum holds around 62,000 works from Central and South America that span 13,000 years of human history and encapsulate diverse cultural knowledge. We have successfully promoted the research of these objects and their unique histories, supporting activities that showed how museum collections can carry and create new meanings for different societies across the globe.

We have extensively supported transdisciplinary research in order to level different knowledge systems –including but not limited to Academia– alongside artistic expressions and alternative forms of critical engagement with collections. Our projects range from collaborative curation, artistic residencies, and scientific analysis to archival digitization, 3D modelling, digital exhibitions, and more. 

The Santo Domingo Legacy

Munduruku “coifa” style headdress made of macaw feathers. Am1913,1114.93 © Trustees of the British Museum

During the course of its six years of funding, SDCELAR promoted participatory interpretation and self-representation through the cocreation of project pages that continue to be shared with the public online on the Centre’s website. By doing so, this digital platform advocates for both transdisciplinarity and plurivocality, as much as it makes space for the oftentimes neglected voices of diversity throughout the historical and cultural narratives it wishes to portray. 

SDCELAR’s website and its coauthored project pages are creative and innovative tools that help bringing together and levelling different types of knowledge. This digital asset ultimately seeks to engender intercultural and multi-directional conversations about heritage, while fostering a more horizontal communication and relationship among the Centre’s network of collaborators across Latin America. 

This platform also aims to diversify historical and cultural narratives by facilitating communication between our affiliate researchers across Central and South America, to promote intercultural and multi-directional conversations about cultural heritage

While the institution develops and manages collections research and intellectual community relationships, the public is often only presented with the final product of these projects. In this process, the details of museum projects and large parts of the collection remain hidden. This digital platform will present the Centre’s ongoing activities and create a dialogue between the many global communities that are interested in cultural and archaeological heritage.