Hacia una nueva idea de nación: tres exposiciones temporales del Museo Nacional de Colombia a partir de la Constitución Política de 1991

Abstract

Conceived as a space of tension in which different discourses about reality are constructed, the museum faces the challenges of each historical moment and thereby the museum is expected to be able to re-think the concepts of culture, memory, history an identity. In the case of the National Museum of Colombia, the Colombian Constitution of 1991 represents a milestone, after which the museum restructured its curatorial policies in order to pave the way to new discourses, narrators and identities. The new Colombian Constitution gathers the aspirations of a country based upon the political values of ethnic and cultural diversity, of equal rights regardless of race, gender o faith, of peace as a Human Right. At first, temporary exhibitions, with more flexible formats than the permanent collections, allowed the museum to fulfill the mandates of the constitution in a more immediate way. The work covers 3 of them (“Velorios y santos vivos: comunidades negras, afrocolombianas, raizales y palenqueras” in 2008, “Yolanda: fragmentos de destierro y desarraigo” in 2003, and “Nación Rock” in 2007), in a period that includes the years following the sanction of the constitution from 1991 to 2010, the year of the bicentennial of the Colombia’s independence. The research tries to account for a history of cultural transformation, a process that can be reviewed in the particularity of the curatorial policy of the National Museum’s temporary exhibitions.