"Two hundred years of work research and knowledge were lost."
September 3, 2018 12:03 AM   Subscribe

The fire at Rio de Janeiro’s 200-year-old National Museum began after it closed to the public on Sunday and raged into the night. There were no reports of injuries, but the loss to Brazilian science, history and culture was incalculable, two of its vice-directors said. “It was the biggest natural history museum in Latin America. We have invaluable collections. Collections that are over 100 years old,” Cristiana Serejo, one of the museum’s vice directors, told the G1 news site. Marina Silva, a former environment minister and candidate in October’s presidential elections said the fire was like “a lobotomy of the Brazilian memory”. Luiz Duarte, another vice-director, told TV Globo: “It is an unbearable catastrophe. It is 200 years of this country’s heritage. It is 200 years of memory. It is 200 years of science. It is 200 years of culture, of education.”
posted by non canadian guy (72 comments total) 24 users marked this as a favorite
 
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posted by Tsuga at 12:08 AM on September 3, 2018


20 million items. It's unfathomable.

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posted by zachlipton at 12:19 AM on September 3, 2018


This is absolutely horrid.

Here's the museum budget over the past few years after severe budget cuts.

Several kms from the fire, people are watching ashes fall, many of them old and historiccal documents which crumble in their hands.
posted by vacapinta at 12:34 AM on September 3, 2018 [9 favorites]


I just heard this on the news...how sad and heartbreaking. Such a huge loss for Brazil.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 12:36 AM on September 3, 2018


Here's a photo of the museum's Egyptian collection, now gone.

Frescos from Pompeii, Greek statues, founding documents of Latin America, pre-Columbian artifacts from across Latin America. All burned.
posted by vacapinta at 12:39 AM on September 3, 2018


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posted by lapolla at 12:42 AM on September 3, 2018


just horrifying. a loss for all humanity. my god, the Brazilian material, let alone the transatlantic collections.
posted by mwhybark at 12:54 AM on September 3, 2018


ugh, these kinds of stories literally make me physically ill, absolutely horrendous.

And, I have to ask, just how much did the draconian budget cuts play a role in this?

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posted by Phlegmco(tm) at 1:31 AM on September 3, 2018 [2 favorites]


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posted by crocomancer at 1:31 AM on September 3, 2018


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posted by moonlight on vermont at 1:34 AM on September 3, 2018


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posted by cstross at 2:03 AM on September 3, 2018


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I can't even comprehend how much has been lost. If it's true that there was wilful neglect of the national museum by the current authorities, I hope they get what's coming to them. It's such a dereliction of duty to not even see to the most basic maintenance of museum buildings. There is no more basic task of government than preserving the heritage of the past for future generations.
posted by Kattullus at 2:52 AM on September 3, 2018 [7 favorites]


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And a middle finger to anyone who supports "austerity".*

* "We can't give the rich tax breaks on their already absurdly low taxes AND provide basic services for the rest of you...so y'all fuck off now."
posted by maxwelton at 2:54 AM on September 3, 2018 [40 favorites]


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posted by kinnakeet at 3:59 AM on September 3, 2018


This is just awful.

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posted by Fuchsoid at 4:02 AM on September 3, 2018


Photos of staff carrying out collection items by hand. Reportedly, the invertebrate and dry vertebrate collections are gone, but the wet vertebrate collection and the herbarium are safe.
posted by zamboni at 4:15 AM on September 3, 2018 [5 favorites]


Oh, Luzia Woman - now we'll never know what you could have told us.

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posted by Mary Ellen Carter at 4:25 AM on September 3, 2018 [2 favorites]


This is a big blow to arachnology in Brasil; apparently around 800 type specimens were lost. A few years ago, there was a fire in another institute (Butantan) which destroyed among other things the arachnological collection there as well. Spiders are stored in alcohol and this makes them highly vulnerable to fires. Brasil has been a powerhouse for taxonomy in South America, and I'm heartbroken at the damage.
posted by dhruva at 4:35 AM on September 3, 2018 [12 favorites]


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This is so sad.
posted by fraula at 5:10 AM on September 3, 2018


And, I have to ask, just how much did the draconian budget cuts play a role in this?

Not to worry. Some poor cleaning person or security guard will be determined to be the cause.
posted by notreally at 5:13 AM on September 3, 2018 [4 favorites]


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posted by XMLicious at 5:22 AM on September 3, 2018


Funny how no one is ever fired for insufficiently funding invaluable things.
posted by Yowser at 5:36 AM on September 3, 2018 [23 favorites]


I have a few friends who did their dissertation research in the archaeological collections here, and had a professor who worked here for years before moving to the US. Those collections were irreplaceable in the most literal sense of the word, and it's just devastating that they've been lost.
posted by ChuraChura at 5:39 AM on September 3, 2018 [7 favorites]


“So perished that marvelous monument of the literary activity of our ancestors, who had gathered together so many great works of brilliant geniuses. In regard to this, however true it may be that in some of the temples there remain up to the present time book chests, which we ourselves have seen, and that, as we are told, these were emptied by our own men in our own day when these temples were plundered—this statement is true enough—yet it seems fairer to suppose that other collections had later been formed to rival the ancient love of literature, and not that there had once been another library which had books separate from the four hundred thousand volumes mentioned, and for that reason had escaped destruction.” — Orosius, vi.15.32
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posted by Fizz at 5:45 AM on September 3, 2018 [4 favorites]


If it's true that there was wilful neglect of the national museum by the current authorities, I hope they get what's coming to them.

hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
*Cries*
All my friends are in shock. This is Brazil. There is zero accountability.
90% of politicians under investigation in the Lava Jato scandal are standing in next months elections.
Further this is Rio de Janeiro where we have a string of politicians in jail but not enough.

Brazil's Museums, as is much of public life, are hopelessly underfunded (portuguese) and several have burnt down in the last 10 years.
The National Museum had previously been closed because of lack of funds but reopened.
This years budget had been slashed again.
Questions are already being asked about how Rio (admittedly with the assistance of the Globo media Mourinho family) could afford the Calatrava designed Museo de Amanha which has nothing but interactive shows and LED displays, and at the same time neglect the Imperial Museum with its irreplaceable 20 million item collection including the legacy of it's native indians.
The two nearest fire hydrants were dry and the others had insufficient pressure for the fire hoses. No one will ever be be held responsible.
The Mayor, an evangelical bishop, ignored the fact of the lost archives and tweeted instead about the loss of the legacy of the Imperial family. Arsehole.
posted by adamvasco at 5:47 AM on September 3, 2018 [32 favorites]


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posted by AlexiaSky at 5:56 AM on September 3, 2018 [1 favorite]


Such terrible news to see.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:17 AM on September 3, 2018


ohgodohgodohgod

A fair bit of my research involves archives, and pretty much my whole PhD cohort were historical musicologists who live their whole lives in archives. This is a nightmare scenario for anybody who was doing work in those archives. Academic careers will be delayed, suspended, and starved out of existence as a result of this.
posted by LMGM at 6:23 AM on September 3, 2018 [8 favorites]


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posted by SonInLawOfSam at 6:59 AM on September 3, 2018


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posted by Joey Michaels at 7:02 AM on September 3, 2018


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posted by JoeXIII007 at 7:25 AM on September 3, 2018


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posted by drezdn at 7:30 AM on September 3, 2018


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posted by sukeban at 7:50 AM on September 3, 2018


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posted by acb at 7:55 AM on September 3, 2018


• so so sad
posted by MovableBookLady at 8:18 AM on September 3, 2018


No fire suppression system? In a museum?!?
posted by CrowGoat at 8:19 AM on September 3, 2018


The two nearest fire hydrants were dry and the others had insufficient pressure for the fire hoses. No one will ever be be held responsible.

And just think what this means for how safe the people of Rio de Janeiro feel right now in their own homes, not to devalue the historical impact of this, but if the hydrants there were in that condition, I would not be putting a lot of stock in the hydrants anywhere else right now. This is horrible on its own but also a canary for a larger disaster and yeah, with the state of Brazil's politics currently I don't see anybody having much faith in this resulting in changes.
posted by Sequence at 8:23 AM on September 3, 2018 [7 favorites]


Yes, no fire sprinker system, from a Reuters story.
posted by the Real Dan at 8:24 AM on September 3, 2018


This is heartbreaking.

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posted by cooker girl at 8:30 AM on September 3, 2018


I can’t imagine what the people who worked there are feeling.

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posted by Bacon Bit at 8:53 AM on September 3, 2018


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Just horrible. I saw this last night and felt hollowed out. Makes me think of when I first heard of the Library of Alexandria, and I realized that things can be lost, knowledge can disappear...
Heartbreaking...
posted by pt68 at 9:17 AM on September 3, 2018 [2 favorites]


Digitise backups of absolutely everything.
posted by jaduncan at 9:37 AM on September 3, 2018 [3 favorites]


They couldn't keep the place open regularly so I imagine the budget for such a project wouldn't be there.
posted by Mitheral at 9:47 AM on September 3, 2018 [2 favorites]


A University of Texas entomologist tweeted last night about the costs of digitizing collections.
posted by Mavri at 9:48 AM on September 3, 2018 [5 favorites]


Digitise backups of absolutely everything.

great plan in theory but often unfortunately difficult to implement. in the 10+ years i spent in private philanthropy i worked with hundreds of organizations that wanted to do this and only dozens were able to manage it. you need significant ongoing funding, ideally an endowment, and a dedicated staff, not just dedicated as in "these people care very much about their work" but as in "they do literally no other task in the organization, ever". you need reliable in-house infrastructure and offsite storage. professional archival/collections software alone is a significant expense.
posted by poffin boffin at 10:01 AM on September 3, 2018 [22 favorites]


and frankly it's a bitch to secure funding for that kind of thing. harder 10 years ago than it is now, admittedly, but it's still something an alarming number of people think can and should be done by an intern with a flatbed scanner on their lunch break.
posted by poffin boffin at 10:03 AM on September 3, 2018 [14 favorites]


Digitise backups of absolutely everything
That takes time to do – think about how long it’d take to run everything in a museum through a 3d scanner, or even every book in a library through an automated scan system — and involves work by specialists. You also need solid IT infrastructure to store and protect the digitized items — multiple copies, periodic integrity checks, etc. — and while staff time could be a little cheaper in Brazil than the US/UK/etc. rooms full of hard drives, tape robots, etc. probably aren’t.

Here’s another way to look at it: I work on the IT side of big digital preservation projects. The museum’s entire budget (n.b. funded at 60%) would pay for one IT specialist or 3 of the automated scan robots many libraries use for books.

There’s just no way to make those numbers work – you can try clever things like Project Gado to get your digitization costs down but then you’re just increasing the storage costs.
posted by adamsc at 10:17 AM on September 3, 2018 [5 favorites]


I worked out of a comparable museum in La Plata, Argentina for a while. It's striking how highly valued such museums were in the past few centuries, and how little they may be today -- or, perhaps more accurately, how when relatively non-affluent emerging cities so quickly turned their attention to great civic cultural monuments, whereas now the same incomparably richer cities claim they cannot afford the upkeep on their own legacy.

A similar situation pertains to my local museum in Canada, which has done little important work since the 1970s and has been coasting on reputation while the government slowly chokes its funding. What was free when I was growing up now costs 27$ (17$ for a child!) and is unaffordable for most local families. How could we have been rich enough in the "bad old days" to create, staff, and support such institutions and yet now so poor we apparently cannot afford to maintain and extend them? There has been such a sweeping Philistinism across much of the world - the cost of everything is known, the value of nothing is: least of all, the value of an institution the poorest child could go into every weekend.

I mean, for supposedly elitist institutions, nothing is more democratic than "free".

And while such institutions were closely implicated in the colonial smash and grab era, many have redeemed themselves somewhat through enlightened policies of repatriation. But in light of this Brazilian fire, I hope not hear any more about the intrinsic value of centralized collections and the dangers of repatriation any time soon.
posted by Rumple at 10:59 AM on September 3, 2018 [13 favorites]




> At the scene, several indigenous people gathered and criticised the fact that the museum containing their most precious artefacts has burned down seemingly because there was no money for maintenance of hydrants, yet the city had recently managed to find a huge budget to build a brand new museum of tomorrow.

This is sadly par for the course for public works of all kinds these days; if there's a big, splashy project that a manager or politician can make their name on, money can always be found (photo ops all around!). But staffing levels and maintenance are a very different story, and and the institution begins to rot from the inside, in ways imperceptible to the public (at least at first). Ask me how I know.
posted by The Card Cheat at 11:11 AM on September 3, 2018 [9 favorites]


How could we have been rich enough in the "bad old days" to create, staff, and support such institutions and yet now so poor we apparently cannot afford to maintain and extend them?

IMO it's that the societal values of those capable of giving private endowments have shifted significantly. It is less exciting to have your name on the wing of an arts & culture organization these days when you could instead use your money to destroy public infrastructure in the name of private profit, or break unions.
posted by poffin boffin at 11:20 AM on September 3, 2018 [10 favorites]


it will always be more profitable under capitalism to cause harm.
posted by poffin boffin at 11:22 AM on September 3, 2018 [1 favorite]


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posted by Doktor Zed at 11:54 AM on September 3, 2018


The Absurd Loss of the National Museum Lifts the Veil on Brazil’s National Project.
The museum did not burn because the country lacks money (remember, the museum is a federal institution). The museum burned down because the country decided that its priority is being a haven for speculative capital appreciation—while freezing investments in health, education, culture, and history. The museum burned down because the country decided that the logic of profit must be widely adopted....
posted by adamvasco at 12:10 PM on September 3, 2018 [8 favorites]


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posted by daybeforetheday at 12:58 PM on September 3, 2018


As an archivist I am saddened by this, and honestly not surprised this doesn't happen more. Virtually every archivist I know in the United States regularly performs miracles with almost non-existent budgets. I can only imagine the situation in other countries. The Beinecke Libraries and Harry Ransom Centers of the world are rare, far more archives and artifacts exist in small governmental and community and college archives that will never have endowed funds. Our culture treats cultural and documentary heritage as a luxury, even though museums, archives, and libraries have many records and artifacts that are essential to documenting and securing people's legal rights.

Current Affairs has had the best commentary on this so far:
What Goes Up In Flames: Austerity kills, and fires show a society’s priorities…

posted by mostly vowels at 2:02 PM on September 3, 2018 [8 favorites]


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posted by Laura in Canada at 2:04 PM on September 3, 2018


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posted by sammyo at 2:05 PM on September 3, 2018


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The loss is unfathomable :C
posted by Faintdreams at 3:31 PM on September 3, 2018


This sucks. I'm still not over the Library of Alexandria!
posted by deadbilly at 6:07 PM on September 3, 2018 [2 favorites]


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posted by facesonflags at 8:13 PM on September 3, 2018


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posted by TwoStride at 8:20 PM on September 3, 2018


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posted by ZeusHumms at 8:48 PM on September 3, 2018


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posted by Joe in Australia at 2:33 AM on September 4, 2018


Devastating Photos Show The Aftermath Of The Fire That Destroyed Brazil's National Museum -
Mauro Albano & Matthew Champion, BuzzFeed News
posted by ZeusHumms at 7:03 AM on September 4, 2018 [1 favorite]


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posted by seyirci at 7:53 AM on September 4, 2018


I’ve never been to Brazil, but all 7.5 billion of us lost something priceless...
posted by sety at 9:24 AM on September 4, 2018 [2 favorites]


To the Heroes of Brazil’s National Museum: "The burning of your museum has been characterized as “history lost”. What burned last night wasn’t just the past; it was the future. Every cultural artifact or natural history specimen is a gift to the future: “This unique artifact will teach you about a person, a culture, a species, the natural world. Learn from it.” Every artifact represents an act of forethought, an investment in future knowledge, and a commitment to tangible truth."
posted by dhruva at 10:22 AM on September 4, 2018 [2 favorites]


And just think what this means for how safe the people of Rio de Janeiro feel right now in their own homes, not to devalue the historical impact of this, but if the hydrants there were in that condition, I would not be putting a lot of stock in the hydrants anywhere else right now. This is horrible on its own but also a canary for a larger disaster and yeah, with the state of Brazil's politics currently I don't see anybody having much faith in this resulting in changes.

I'm not surprised that this happened in Rio, but more surprised that it doesn't happen more often and that it didn't take half of Rio with it. There is sadly only one way that the story of a city with virtually no fire codes can end.
posted by dances with hamsters at 7:45 PM on September 4, 2018


Standing in solidarity with the National Museum of Brazil

Note also that there is a crowdsourcing effort in Brazil to get visitors and researchers (who may have digital images and digital records of the collections) to contribute whatever documentation they have to help rebuild a virtual Museo. These efforts might at least salvage some of the research potential of the collections that were lost. They also, sadly, will help identify the extent of what was lost.

Students from Unirio, a museum studies program in Brazil, are behind this effort at collecting digital documentation of the collections and the museum galleries (images, 3D models, digital records). Researchers and visitors can send their information to any of the following email addresses:

thg.meseo@gmail.com
lusantosmuseo@gmail.com
isabelasfrreitas@gmail.com

An article (in Portuguese) about this effort.
posted by gudrun at 10:24 AM on September 6, 2018 [1 favorite]


Project to salvage images of collection lost in fire as Brazil mourns museum
An appeal by Rio de Janeiro students received thousands of replies amid soul-searching over the neglect of cultural heritage.
posted by adamvasco at 2:59 PM on September 12, 2018 [2 favorites]


Brazil Lost More Than the Past in the National Museum Fire -- Uncovering the damage done to the country’s present and future. (Alejandro Chacoff for The New Yorker, September 16, 2018)
“At the end of the nineteenth century, the National Museum was the center of scientific determinism in Brazil,” Gustavo Pacheco, who studied and worked there for six years, told me. “They measured craniums and that sort of thing. It’s a history full of contradictions, just as Brazilian history is full of contradictions. But a country needs these places to understand itself.”

Pacheco himself has a deep love for the place. A diplomat, he now works at the culture department of the Federal District, in Brasília, where he oversees a memorial for indigenous peoples. He did his doctorate in social anthropology, in the same program to which Barros is applying. He also worked as a researcher in ethnomusicology at the museum. He is still waiting to hear what happened to invaluable old recordings from the Pareci and Nambikwara tribes, though he has little hope that they have been saved. Pacheco was promoting his first collection of short stories—a book he wrote over several years, drawing partly on his research at the museum—when he started receiving messages on his phone. “I got into the car, and before turning on the engine I cried for, like, fifteen minutes, in front of my two children,” he said.

Pacheco does not hesitate to connect the disaster to the larger issues facing the country. “No one in their right mind would claim that institutions are working,” he said. But he also balks at attempts to pin the fire on a single administration. “Everyone knows that the neglect had been there for decades,” he said. “In 1999, when I started my Ph.D., the museum already had this aura of decay, it was already full of termites. Ask people about the smell. It was a very peculiar smell.”
Emphasis mine.

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posted by filthy light thief at 12:07 PM on September 19, 2018


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