Tommaso Rada, Italy

Anatomy of a Museum

"Who does not remember visiting, as a child, a Natural History Museum?
Before TV shows, tablets and smart phones, the Natural History Museum was the place to discover and learn about all the fauna and flora of the Planet. Entering the Natural History Museum was like crossing a magic portal and traveling to remote and unknown places. A journey in space and time made of dinosaur's skeletons, strange fish and fossils, bizarre plants and animals of all kind. Visiting the Museum was the way to achieve a knowledge regarding natural history and particularly to feed our imagination about our Planet and its transformation.
In 2015 the University of Porto started renewing the building that host the Natural History Museum of the city.
In order to renovate the space, the exhibition rooms were dismissed and all the animals and objects belonging to the collection were wrapped up to be protected and stored in a new space.
During this transitions phase the equilibrium and the magic of the Museum changed: the animals and the objects gained a new and bizarre life. Displaced from their defined position and out from the staged environment created for the display, they became strange objects, weird creatures inhabiting the space abandoned by the guards of the buildings."