Exhibition and artistic research project, Copenhagen, 2025

Reframing the Treasure is an artistic investigation into how cultural heritage acquires value through the institutions that preserve, classify and display it. Taking as its point of departure the seventeenth-century manuscript El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno by the Indigenous Andean chronicler Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, the project examines the relationship between architecture, cultural authority and the production of historical narratives.

The manuscript, written in colonial Peru and held by the Royal Danish Library in Copenhagen, is displayed as part of the institution’s permanent Treasures exhibition. Within the carefully controlled environment of the library’s exhibition galleries, it is presented as an object of exceptional historical and cultural value. Yet the conditions of its display also raise questions about the distance between the object and the cultural contexts from which it emerged. Who determines how such an object should be presented? Which forms of knowledge inform these decisions? And what other relationships with the manuscript might become possible if the authority to design its exhibition were placed elsewhere?

Reframing the Treasure approaches these questions through a speculative proposition: what if Peruvian architects were invited to redesign the exhibition space in which the manuscript is displayed?

For the project, Lara invited two established architectural practices from Peru to develop alternative proposals for the presentation of the manuscript at the Royal Danish Library. The collaborators included architect Rodolfo Cortegana, associated with the design of the Pachacamac Site Museum, and Luisa Yupa, a museographer at Peru’s Ministry of Culture and former exhibition designer at the Museo de Arte de Lima (MALI).

Working from their respective experiences of architecture, museology and cultural heritage in Peru, the architects developed proposals that reconsidered the spatial, symbolic and institutional conditions surrounding the manuscript. Their architectural drawings were subsequently interpreted and materialised by Lara as three-dimensional models, transforming speculative designs into physical objects that could be encountered within an exhibition.

The resulting installation, presented at Astrid Noacks Atelier in Copenhagen, brought these alternative architectural propositions into dialogue with the existing display at the Royal Danish Library. Rather than offering definitive solutions, the models operate as speculative possibilities, suggesting how different cultural perspectives might produce other ways of organising space, constructing meaning and establishing relationships with historical objects.

The exhibition was accompanied by a public panel discussion addressing questions of cultural heritage, representation and institutional authority, to which representatives of the Royal Danish Library were invited.

At the centre of Reframing the Treasure is a deliberate displacement of curatorial authority. By imagining a situation in which Peruvian voices are entrusted with redesigning the conditions under which an object of Peruvian heritage is presented in Denmark, the project challenges the apparent neutrality of museum architecture and exhibition design. It proposes that the ways in which cultural objects are made visible are inseparable from the histories, power relations and forms of knowledge that determine their value.

Rather than proposing the restitution of the manuscript as its only possible horizon, Reframing the Treasure opens a space for considering how cultural agency might be redistributed through artistic and architectural imagination. The project forms part of Lara’s ongoing research into displaced heritage and the possibilities of developing alternative narratives, relationships and forms of authorship around objects held in European collections.