Spain hosts exhibition on pre-Hispanic cultures.
Madrid, May 27 (EFE)
Spain will host an exhibition in two of its cities featuring the largest loan of gold artifacts from Colombia to the country. The exhibition, with more than 290 pieces, explores pre-Hispanic cultures and will make its first stop in Alicante, in eastern Spain.
The exhibition, titled “Gold and the Universe: Indigenous Knowledge of Colombia,” will be a traveling show. It will open on June 29 at the Archaeological Museum of Alicante (MARQ) and will move in 2027 to the Gaiás Center Museum of the Cidade da Cultura Foundation in Santiago de Compostela, Galicia (northwest Spain), before traveling to the Mamuz Museum in Austria in 2028.
Among the objects on display, more than half of which are made of gold and considered unique in design and technical mastery, are masks, earrings, and pectorals, as well as hybrid figures such as human-bats and shamans in flight.
The exhibition was presented this Wednesday at Casa América in Madrid, at an event attended by the Colombian ambassador to Spain, Eduardo Ávila Navarrete; political representatives from Alicante and Galicia; and one of the exhibition’s curators, Marcos Martinón-Torres, Professor of Archaeological Sciences at the University of Cambridge.
“Beyond that superficial fascination, you will discover that the true importance of gold lies in its capacity to interact with the world,” said Martinón-Torres about the exhibition, which will be immersive, with settings and content about the indigenous world using architecture, museography, music, sounds, and smells based on recent research.
“This exhibition brings together reflections we have made over the last decade thanks to long-term research projects, such as those we have developed with the University of Cambridge, but also thanks to the temporary exhibitions we have held here at the Museum,” noted Marcela García Sierra, a Colombian anthropologist, museologist, and curator at the Gold Museum in Bogotá, who is also a curator of this exhibition, in a video shown at the press conference.
For the Colombian ambassador to Spain, the exhibition “allows for a lively dialogue between past and present, between America and Europe,” and added that its arrival in Spain represents a decentralization, “a powerful message,” since “culture must reach all territories, all corners of the planet.”
