What’s this supposed to be? Among all the neatly classified items there is a drawer full of grimy rags, tangled together, some of them with traces of human hair and skin.
The label tells us they are “burial finds from Peru”. So these rags, today disheveled in a drawer, once were carefully buried with human bodies in Ancón on the Peruvian coast.
The Swedish Vanadis expedition arrived in Ancón in the 1880’s, but these textiles are much older. The Vanadis expedition also brought mummies and craniums from this burial area. Today there is an ongoing discussion about how to handle human remains in museum collections.
We don’t know how the people in the graves once imagined life after death. However, the textiles from the graves were part of a conception of the world where the living and the dead held their specific positions.
Continue to showcase P12.