“Machu Picchu and the golden empires of Peru”: after Florida and Paris, the traveling exhibition arrives in Milan

Wherever it has been exhibited, it has set records and stood out for the success of its event: it brought together 100,000 people at the Boca Raton Museum of Art, Florida, and at the Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine, a museum located in Plaza of the Trocadero in Paris, about 250 thousand went to see it. After a year of touring the United States and France, the exhibition “Machu Picchu and the golden empires of Peru” has now arrived in Milan, where last Saturday it opened its doors at the Museum of Cultures (Mudec).

Located in Vía Tortona, an Italian neighborhood where art and design converge in spaces recovered from an old industrial complex, the Mudec houses more than 180 objects, including gold and silver pieces from ancient Perucomplete trousseaus, textiles, and pre-Columbian ceramic and stone pieces, which are part of the collection of the Larco Museum, in Lima, and the Manuel Chávez Ballón Site Museum, in Aguas Calientes, Cusco.

“The exhibition more than fulfills its mission, in the sense that people manage to connect with the narrative, manage to understand the main concepts that we have tried to communicate, and above all manage to enjoy, appreciate and connect with the value of the objects, as communicators of this worldview”, emphasizes Ulla Holmquistdirector of the Larco Museum and curator of this traveling exhibition together with the archaeologist Carole Fraresso.

Holmquist highlights the narrative and the use of virtual reality technological resources that the exhibition’s museography presents. And it is that from their first stop in the United States, the visitor lives the experience of virtually flying over the Inca citadel of Machu Picchu and seeing it in detail, thanks to a video filmed with drones in 2020 by the Inkaterra association, taking advantage of its closure during the pandemic.

“It is what we intended to achieve, above all, as a popularizing exhibition, where the public that in general has not been introduced to pre-Columbian cultures beyond knowing Machu Picchu, achieves from this connection to enter and travel in time, and understand why Machu Picchu is also a synthesis of this way of being in the world and of the relationship between the beings that inhabit it and their environment”, points out the director of the Larco Museum. In this itinerant tour, she has not only witnessed the value that visitors give to the collection, but also the interest in learning more about our country; “Therefore, the exhibition also fulfills its mission of being an ambassador of Peru.”

Organized by World Heritage Exhibitions-Cityneon Holdings, with the support of the Ministry of Culture and in alliance with the Inkaterra association, “Machu Picchu and the golden empires of Peru” will be open to the public until February 19, 2023, and takes place in parallel to the activities of the Year of Peru, organized in the Mudec and that includes symposiums on Peruvian textiles, gastronomic gatherings, typical dance classes and graphic design contests inspired by Peruvian iconography.

KNOW MORE

• As part of the Year of Peru in the Mudec, educational programs have also been developed for pre-school, primary, secondary and upper secondary grades, with the aim of promoting in schoolchildren an interest in pre-Columbian cultures and that are in line with the workshops that the Larco Museum develops in Lima (on Ai Apaec and the Inca quipu). On Monday, October 10, these programs were presented at a conference attended by approximately 150 teachers from Milan.
• Milan is home to the largest Peruvian community in Italy, which in turn is the third largest in Europe, after Madrid and Barcelona.