Unexpected agencies: The museification of colonial past in nineteenth-century Chile

Abstract

Through the analysis of different contexts associated with the Coloniaje Exhibition (1873), such as historiography, memory and forms of interpretation and construction of colonial images; this article tries to demonstrate that the museum display of historical collections in Nineteenth-Century Chile, is related to the resignification of objects and the colonial past. This process is reflected in the development of a visual culture (Baxandall, 2000 y Alpers, 1983) as well as in the emergence of unexpected forms of agency in respect to the images (Gell, 1998).