Museums and Mausoleums: Museographical Practices of Galician Identity

This article analyses the museographical practices of the Museo do Pobo Galego, and its central part in the formation of a museistic complex that also includes the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, and the Panteón dos Galegos Ilustres within the urbanistic plans of the city of Santiago de Compostela. The article focuses on how this architectural centre has symbolised an aesthetic tension between a stereotypical past reality (a rural, backwards, and superstitious Galicia) and a modern present (a largely industrial, and cosmopolitan Galicia) that articulates a Galician identity or galeguidade, which is distinctively mythical and uchronic. By playing with the idea of lieux de mémoire-in terms of Pierre Nora (1989)-the museographical complex represents the struggle to define a Galeguidade through the articulation of a mnemonic discourse inscribed, primarily, in dynamics of time and space. The relation between past and present manifests as a museographical function as well as a cultural and political paradigm, placing the Museo do Pobo, the CGAC, and the Panteón in a dynamic of continuous historical process. In sum, this study attempts to show how Galicianness is articulated not only in two dialectic times 'past and present', but also through the desire to understand the present as a product of the past in a concrete Galician space.