Authenticating, forging and patrimonializing. The Alzate ceramics and the transformation of its valuation

Abstract

The Alzate ceramics case is a well-known episode in which a group of local experts and some European scientists were deceived by a family from the city of Medellin in the early twentieth century known as the Alzate family, who manufactured clay ceramics for commercial purposes, which ended up in some of the most important museums in the world such as the Museum of Natural History in New York, the Trocadero Museum in France, the Museum of Neuchâtel in Switzerland, among other institutions, as original pre-Columbian. This particular fact, configures a chapter without precedents as far as the valuation of the pre-Columbian cultural patrimony is concerned, the reinterpretation of this one on the part of some local craftsmen and the commercialization of the material past of the natives that gave origin to a local artistic expression based on indigenist models of the past. On the other hand, it is an episode like few others in which an object goes from being considered as an invaluable material
evidence of the American cultures of before the conquest, to being considered as forgeries of little value to be considered later as important pieces for their aesthetics and cultural load being currently guarded by several museum institutions in Colombia and the world.