Emergent taxonomies

The museum Inti-Quilla in Punta de Balasto, Santa María valley, NW Argentina, greets visitors with a wonderful assemblage of objects.Exposing collecting as self-making, place-making, landscape-building, this wondrous taxonomy results from the dream of one man and his family, but it is a community museum that houses hundreds of donations from the area. This assemblage of artefacts and materials re-classifies the value of things ‘of heritage’ and its quiet but active questioning of hegemonic aesthetics resonates throughout the area. As one of the family members put it when explaining the logic behind the exhibition: “Other museums here are boring, they only show you old stuff.  Here we show everything that belonged to the Indians, but also to the old people, and the ancestors. Our life from then and now.”