Mercado Central
The main location in the city for buying and selling fish. The periphery of the large indoor market is filled with large fish laid out in lines, heaps of scallops and shrimp, and even aquariums exhibiting live fish. I couldn't quite figure out if these ones were for sale, but it seemed more likely that they were display only. All the workers in this area were decked out in floor-length thick rubber aprons and big boots. In the center of the market lay a collection of restaurants, filled with plenty of locals chatting pleasantly over a bottle of wine and the freshest seafood money can buy. Squeezed between the restaurants and the market were stands selling everything from tourist trinkets to fine jewelry. I found a beautiful pair of silver and lapis lazuli earrings for a decent price. We looked at a pair of cufflinks for Adrian but could not find any with high enough quality lapis lazuli.
Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino http://www.precolombino.cl/en/
We were lucky to arrive there on a Sunday, which meant free admission--yay! Since it was a long walk, we first stopped at the museum cafe. I tried a minty lemonade, which was delicious and refreshing!
The first exhibit we saw was a temporary display of funerary bundles from the Paracas indigenous peoples. The funerary bundles can be viewed on the museum's website -- link above -- but some things that made them unique were the sophistication of the burial practices so early in human history, the quality of preservation -- in part due to the desert climate, and the craftsmanship of the textiles in which the bundles were wrapped.
For the permanent exhibits, we started with "Chile before Chile," which examined select artifacts from each people known to have inhabited Chile before the Spanish conquest. With a diverse topography and climate over a vast expanse in South America, Chile was home to an array of indigenous cultures. The desert cultures -- Nazca and Paracas, for example -- have the best preserved pieces because of the climate. One of these civilizations practiced a sophisticated form of mummification, such as replacing the internal organs with mud and sticks. This practice was in place long before Egyptian mummification, despite the reputation Egyptians have for their mummification. Maybe the Latin American mummies are not as well regarded because they were sensible enough to never wake back up, like some Egyptian ones are said to have done. I leave the speculation to you. Along with the mummies were a smattering of artifacts commemorating the dead, including some interesting larger-than-life wooden figures found over the graves of another civilization's burial plots. These figures were meant to mimic the look of the person in their life. The faces reminded me of the style used for the stone figures found in Easter Island. Other notable items were some fine and rather heavy-looking silver jewelry pieces worn around the necks of noble women or chief's wives.
My favorite display in this section was a collection of Incan quipu cords. These cords were, in some ways, the Incan system of "writing". No one really knows how they were read -- the conquistadors were hardly interested in woven cords that contained neither silver nor gold. However, it is known that these cords were used for accounting and, in the hands of an educated elite class of Inca, were also used to encode dates that preserved the history of the Inca Empire.
Phew! It is getting late and we have to be up early tomorrow, so I may need to stop here and add to this piece another time. Other pieces I enjoyed were the gold- and silver- plated metalworks, which was a technology developed here very early in human history. Also, the textile room which showed a mind-boggling number of creative and intricate patterns unique to each tribe/people.
Cathedral
Writing in progress... more to come!
Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes
A beautiful building straddles one of the city's many parks. These parks are -- for lack of a better word -- skinny, and they tend to follow the "river" -- a waterway over concrete that breaks up the city into north and south. Apparently the building architecture is neoclassical. Whatever it is, it is striking day and night. The museum is now free to all visitors, as a way to make it more accessible to Chileans. The center of the building was occupied by a large display resembling a double-layered purple which, upon further inspection, turned out to be a collection of propped up and suspended paper "blobs" dyed purple.
Our first room was a piece called "el rapto," or "the rapture." It showed a sculpture depicting a scene from the End Times, with a woman caught off-guard by her own rapture in the middle of throwing a Molotov cocktail. Her expression was tough to decipher because she was masked, but her eyes were closed and she appeared peaceful. The flame of the Molotov cocktail was the only part of the sculpture that made contact with the ground, fully supporting the belly-up, spread-eagled figure. Quite an engineering feat!
Another exhibit focused on the depiction of men and women in art: how the concept of gender polarization came about, how it was perpetuated, and how the art world has grown to embrace a more nuanced view of sex and gender. Though it is probably more common to see exhibits like this in big cities, it was reassuring to see this exhibit in a country entrenched in "machismo" beginning to examine itself in such a profound way.
No comments:
Post a Comment