”Convalescent Memories” – National Museum, Brazil (Museu Nacional Rio de Janeiro)

During the night of 2nd September 2019, the Brazilian National Museum, localized in Rio de Janeiro, burned and lost millions of archaeological pieces. The museum is the oldest scientific institute of Brazil (since XIX century) and was about to celebrate 200 years of history when due to the irresponsibility of the country with the museum necessity of repairs ( the fire system was from the 70s), one of the most important American museums lost since windows of your palace till a huge piece of Brazilian history.
You can google it and see for yourself the night of that flames, that I’ll never forget. We, students, professors, scientists, biologists, spent weeks talking about it at university; the academic society and science community cried overnights with the irreplaceable and totally avoidable incident.
Since that September I had the ”mission” of finishing at least one artwork about it, so I did. ”Convalescent Memories”, finished exactly today, is not only a ”inspired” but totally based artwork on some allegories about the museum losts and ”refounds” after the fire. In this post, I would like to present the details of this canvas.
Firstly, the background includes an accurate museum architecture painting; all number of windows, statues, pillars, the proportion between the elements that compose the original palace are there. All architectonic details were included, carefully designed to give you the sensation of something not really defined as past or present. Below, a close up of the description of this paragraph. The museum ”stands” somewhere far from the beach that the two main characters, tired, remain.  The beach and ocean scenario have at least five reasons why to be done this way, but I’ll give you all just one, to let you guys find out all the other possibilities: They are survivors of the time, coming up from the bottom of the storm, convalescent live memories.  The sea is relatively calm, calm enough to take a breath.

The pics are awful but, I had no time on the photo studio yet, and I must wait for it to be completely dry so I must apologize.         

About the main characters we have: an unknown young man with native reference, and far from physically beautiful, but real, Luzia, my interpretation from the oldest South American skull of women from b. 11.500-13.000years found on the Minas Gerais state. I have spent months doing lots of research on this artwork, especially because of the next details.
 The reason why I’m publishing this in such an informal way is, to give you all a preview of exhibition contents: nice pictures and exhibitions are quite unnatural, so why not to give you this perspective.

The hardest part: The details.
This piece may seem pretty simple: two human forms, some stuff on the background.
You might be quite right, except by 15 scientific details proportional and following restrict archaeological aspects: Ja, that’s right, if you count you will find 16 pieces of National Museum Archive. 13 insects and 2 geological samples of the magnificent collection of this museum, precisely, one meteorite and one quartz making part of Luzia’s body.

My pictures can maybe trick you all a bit, but soon enough I’ll update some very nice pictures, especially cause this work is part of my application on A Design Awards and they are really serious with this presentation thing.  Anyways, proceeding.. I also need to upload a map which ”where is each thing” to help you, but for now, you can check the species below, a list with the items:

1- Angra dos Reais Meteorite – That’s my favourite one and Luzia is holding it, delicately, with your right hand.
2- Minas Gerais Quartz .
3-Grasseia menelaus tenuilimbata (Butterfly) 
4-Evenus regalis  (Butterfly)
5-Macrothemis tesselata (Dragonfly)
6-Polythore saundersi (Dragonfly)
7-Macrothemis declivata (Dragonfly)
8-Rothschildia aurota speculifera; Saturnidae (Moth)
9-Parides ascanius; Papilionidae (Butterfly)
10 – Agrias claudina annetta; Nymphalidae (Moth)
11-Heraclides androgeus laodocus (Male – Butterfly)
12-Fulgora  (Cicada)
13- Heraclides androgeus laodocus (Female – Butterfly)
14-Diaethria clymena janeira

If you count if for real, you may found 15 ‘things’, and that’s because I painted two of my favourite Brazilian butterfly species with 2 different angles to show you the beauty of their ‘dual’ wings.

Is your job (people, humans) to save history, science, knowledge, doesn’t matter from who it belongs, when It happened, what is happening. It is our responsibility: save a book from rain, take a note about something new.