Pre-Columbian Art
Museum: Multimedia exhibit about
America's animals
The
jaguar, the condor, the duck, the llama or the hummingbird
are some of the animals that represent fantastic
stories based on Andean America mythology. This
oral tradition is what the Chilean Pre-Columbian
Art Museum recovers in the exhibit Animal Stories,
especially designed for kids, based on multimedia
and open till the end of may 2003. Animals still
occupy a very important place in the beliefs of
old American cultures. Animals like the puma, the
serpent and the fox, according to the Andean mythology
are very powerful wild animals, and are even considered
supernatural because of their speed, their agility,
their privileged view skills, their slyness. Each
culture had different stories they would tell around
the fire when the night fell, and so they transmitted
them to the children, who would listen in complete
amazement.
The Moches believed the owl and the hummingbird
helped the healers to win over the evil spirits
of sickness. On the Chavin culture, the jaguar-man
is the one to defend people from alien enemies.
The
llama has a main place on Atacama´s legends;
it lives in a constellation and travels at night
to the earth to give the shepards its wool, which
they will trade for more llamas.
This way, the exhibit allows
kids to know their Latin-American ancestors better,
while offering an alternative to the endless fantasy
machine that now represent Japanese or American
cartoons. The exhibit Animals stories stands like
an identity source for children in Chile, now developing
in a surrounding that lacks referents about American
culture.
