Unpacking the Universe: a Review

This is a review of a documentary that chronicles the six year process of developing and installing a museum display of Columbian cultural heritage. As someone who is currently attempting to put together a small display–microscopic by comparison–this documentary appealed to me right away.

But almost from the beginning I could tell it this was going to unfold differently than anticipated. Both for me and the museum staff planning their exhibition. The exhibition was one of ancient Columbian artifacts, many of them from the Tairona people who lived around 900-1600 CE.

After weeding out a few fakes, the museum staff of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) realized that they would need to do a field trip to Columbia in order get an idea of the context of their collection and better understand their origins. They even needed to even know if what they had was what they thought they had. Many if not most of their artifacts were gifted, thus without archaeological provenance.

Initially, the LACMA team looked at artifacts in Columbia’s Museo del Oro (“museum of gold”) and compared them to high-resolution photos of their own back in California, which helped them understand what to look for in fake or fraudulent pieces. However, they soon realized they needed more. They needed to visit the sites of the Tairona people and to ultimately collaborate with their descendant populations. In the words of Diana Magaloni, one of the LACMA curators, “the way things are made really reflect who made them and the society in that moment.”

So they looked at the archaeology by visiting the site of Ciudad Perdida (“lost city”), sometimes referred to as the “Machu Picchu” of Columbia. And its here that the viewer gets a first taste of what the LACMA team ultimately learn later from the descendant population: that sense of interconnectedness that the Arhauaco people of today–and very possibly the Tairona people of 900 CE–believe exists with all things and humanity.

As interested as I was in the discussions about fake versus real artifacts, I have to admit this is where the real story of this documentary begins. Everything up to now was all prelude.

The LACMA team were confronted by the Arhuaco people who had some very unsettling and unexpected things to say about the artifacts in their possession back in California. “We were hoping [they’d] really guide us… say something about these to us.”

I don’t want to spoil the documentary’s ability to tell the story in a review, but I will say the direction the LACMA team was taken in, clearly one they weren’t expecting, led them to the choices they made in the exhibition. One that integrates nature into the aesthetic and attempts to share with the visitor the importance of being connected with the universe; with nature; and with each other.

I only touched on a few of the highlights from this film. I watch a lot of documentaries and often find myself using them as background noise while I’m accomplishing some other task, occasionally stopping to watch some interesting bit. Sometimes I even rewind to listen more closely to something that caught my near unconscious attention.

Not with Unpacking the Universe. I sat glued to my television through the entire thing. It was nearly 2 hours long, but I hardly noticed the time. I do wish there was more on the process of sorting out fakes and smuggled artifacts. There were some interesting insights and I never realized you could tell an artifact was likely smuggled by giving it an x-ray, but they examined one and made a logical case that it was not fake, but likely smuggled.

If you like to watch documentaries related to cultural heritage, archaeology, anthropology, and history, I highly recommend subscribing to the Heritage Broadcasting Service. As it happens, Unpacking the Universe: The making of an Exhibition is one of their free offerings, at least for now. Click the link and watch it for free, and be sure to browse their full catalog while you’re there.

If you sign up for an annual subscription, it works out to just under $6/month! HBS is truly what we all wish the History Channel really was. I’ve been watching this channel on and off for over a year now and their catalog is growing each month.