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What Is Lost When a Museum Vanishes? In Brazil, a Nation’s Story
By Michael Kimmelman

Ash is still blowing through the park surrounding Brazil’s National Museum, which continues to tally its losses. According to the deputy director at the museum, a 200-year-old Rio de Janeiro institution, the fire that burned down much of the building two weeks ago may have consumed 90 percent of the collection.

That’s thousands, maybe millions, of objects — incomprehensible numbers.

It’s always easier to think in smaller terms, specific examples. The museum preserved documentation of indigenous languages for which there are no longer any living native speakers, as The New York Times has reported. Every one of those records apparently went up in smoke, taking with it a culture, a civilization, the story of a life, a chapter of us.

Because that’s what museums like the National Museum ultimately do. They piece together the narrative of who we are, where we come from, where we belong — in the universe, on this planet, as nations, communities, individuals.
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But during recent years, residents have watched government officials funnel billions toward the Olympics, the World Cup and projects like Santiago Calatrava’s Museum of Tomorrow, ignoring public services and bedrock institutions like the National Museum, whose cash-starved curators, even before the fire, became so desperate that they took to crowdsourcing funds to repair tattered displays.

Writing in the newspaper El País, Washington Fajardo, an architect and planner from Rio, described Brazil as “a happy prisoner of modernity.” His point: The country’s political and business leaders, grasping and reckless, have fixated on projecting Brazil as a global front-runner and neglected the country’s cultural patrimony.
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Adapted version from The New York Times, September, 2018.