Solange Adum Abdala

Ornis I y Ornis II: La Muerte es Bella y la Eternidad También [Ornis I and Ornis II: Death is Beautiful as Well as Eternity] takes as its starting point the formal criteria of zoological classification and the photographic tradition of typology. It examines how, from both the sciences and the arts, knowledge about nature is produced through the archive.

The pieces from the Ornithology collection of the Natural History Museum of San Marcos reveal a hermetic and enclosed space. Flight, a symbol of freedom, life, and transit, is suspended to give way to the stillness of the scientific and museographic archive, making visible a way of giving materiality to death and memory. The human care and effort devoted to their preservation seem to extend their existence, although they remain destined to deteriorate.

Ornis I and Ornis II thus propose a reflection on the paradox of attempting to fix that which, by nature, is destined to decay. At the same time, they highlight the resources of scientific practices and their classificatory logics in the construction of an archive that projects future usefulness, even for a time when we ourselves will have perished.