GLAM/Newsletter/June 2025/Contents/Mexico report

This Month in GLAM – Volume XV, Issue VI, June 2025

Mexico report

Open Cultural Data Hackathon in Puebla

Pluralist Views on Artifacts in Ethnographic Collections

In 2024, BUAP and the GLAM working group of the Opendata.ch association teamed up to implement a novel method (termed “CultureFLOW”) for the facilitation of artistic creative processes that engage with collective memories, both in the form of heritage artifacts and in the form of living memories, thereby reenacting and reinterpreting them in a co-creative approach.

At the occasion of the hackathon’s opening ceremony, the first series of artistic projects, initiated in 2024, were presented by students of ARPA:

"La Mithotia de las máscaras" (“mascarade”): At the suggestion of the Burgdorf Castle Museum, a team of students at ARPA produced a short video and an animation film involving several Mexican masks from the museum’s exhibition giving their perspective on them. The video and the animation film have been included in interactive video stations in the museum, which comprise further contributions from people from various cultures living in Burgdorf. The content of the video station is also available on the museum’s website. The cooperation has been complemented by an exhibition in the museum’s foyer about Mexican “bordado” culture and Mexican mask culture, featuring the “bordados” and sculptures used for the animation film.

"Maximilian of Habsburg": Originating from the territory of today’s Switzerland, the dynasty of the Habsburg has been present in many different countries, and its members have been associated with a variety of historical events that have left their traces in our collective memories. Responding to the challenge to tell a story about the Habsburg from the point of view of Mexican history, a student group has produced a short animation film in 2D about Emperor Maximilan’s last day (execution), which will be screened at Mexico’s Fuerte de Loreto Museum in August 2025.

"Mujer Lipan" is a stop-motion short film project centering around a statue of a Lipan woman in the collection of the ethnographic museum in Geneva. Its aim is to dive into the collective memory of the Lipan people (the south-easternmost Apache tribe living across the border between Texas and Mexico). For this purpose, the project team is planning to travel to the border region in order to meet representatives of the tribe.

Two further projects were initiated during the Hackatón BAM BUAP 2025:

"Kalakas Chidas" proposes an interdisciplinary collaboration between Visual Arts and Film students. The concept combines installation art with a "one-minute film", thematizing two human tragedies in a Día de Muertos setting. The historical artifacts used are a collection of 29 papier-mâché calacas (skeleton figures) from the Ethnographic Museum of Neuchâtel that pay homage to the Mexican people and their resilience during the 1985 earthquake, and photographic records from the Historical Archives to commemorate a 1973 Puebla tragedy: the killing of three students and a professor. Currently, the team has completed preliminary sketches and historical research, with institutional support from ARPA’s Director to finalize the project for presentation at the next BAM BUAP Hackathon.

"Pre-Columbian Masks" was developed during the hackathon using digitized images from the Museum Rietberg’s Pre-Columbian mask collection. It involved two phases: A cyanotype workshop teaching participants this alternative photographic technique, and the creation of a large-scale textile mask collage incorporating cyanotype prints and embroidery, designed to introduce the university community to this collection through mixed-media art.

Starting point and source of inspiration for the artistic processes leading to these projects is most often a museum catalog. For this purpose, we are working towards improving the access to Mesoamerican collections: Institutions holding artifacts from Mesoamerica are being approached in order to ask them to make their collections accessible online in line with the OpenGLAM Principles. They are asked to make their catalogs available in a machine-readable format, and – to the extent possible – to make photographs available for reuse by uploading them to Wikimedia Commons. A first showcase has been provided by Museum Rietberg in Zurich, which has uploaded some highlights from their collections and are ready to upload further high-quality images of their collection items on demand.

Promoting Open GLAM in the State of Puebla

Both the ongoing cooperation with our Swiss partners and the launch of the Hackatón BAM as a recurring annual event are important cornerstones in the development of a fully-fledged Open GLAM programme for the State of Puebla. In the context of this year’s hackathon, the following milestones have been reached:

First digitization projects and image uploads to Wikimedia Commons, referencing metadata on Wikidata have been initiated, involving ARPA BUAP, BUAP Historical Archives, and the BUAP Art Gallery.

Concepts have been developed for the new online catalogue of the BUAP Historical Archives and for ARPA’s online audiovisual archive.

Reflections have been made as to how to support future hackathons with appropriate online infrastructure.

Student interns have been involved to support digitization and data publication activities of cultural heritage institutions in Puebla. These internship activities provide valuable opportunities for undergraduate students to acquire professional skills and will be further developed in the future.