LUZIA, 2019
Overhead projector and paper
Variable dimensions
Museu da Ciência da Universidade de Coimbra (Portugal)
The installation Luzia was presented at the Museu da Ciência da Universidade de Coimbra during the university’s Cultural Week. The work takes as its starting point one of the most striking episodes in the recent history of Brazilian scientific institutions: the fire that struck the Museu Nacional do Brasil, in Rio de Janeiro, in September 2018.
The disaster destroyed roughly ninety percent of the institution’s collection, considered one of the most important in Latin America in the fields of natural history, anthropology and archaeology. Among the most symbolic losses was the skull of Luzia, identified as the oldest Homo sapiens fossil ever found in Brazil.
The installation takes this figure as a starting point for reflecting on scientific memory, cultural heritage, and the vulnerability of the institutions responsible for preserving knowledge.