The Chopo Museum is preparing a grand look at 50 years of its history.

A social center disguised as a museum. A porous and elastic museum. This is how the Museo Universitario del Chopo is perceived today. This November, it will celebrate 50 years as a UNAM exhibition center, but also a forum for discussion and a sounding board for all identities.

The building bears little resemblance to the architectural styles of the northern part of Mexico City, and for that reason, it is a landmark in Santa María la Ribera, thanks to the attractive copper oxide on the top of its towers, and to its atypical Jugendstil iron frame, which was shipped over a century ago, piece by piece, from Düsseldorf, Germany. But, above all, it is one of the museums that has best achieved cohesion with the community that shaped it and that continues to appeal to it as a space where the voices of dissent are heard in the streets and suburbs and also within its halls.

The entire history of the Museo del Chopo and its history, from the building's first functions as the home of the Japanese Pavilion in 1910 and three years later as the Natural History Museum, to the 1960s; but, above all, for what it has meant over the last five decades as a sounding board for countercultures, expressions that fought for the full exercise of gender diversity and the defense of identities that rarely found replicas within museums, will be addressed in a broad program of exhibitions, concerts, performances, discussions, screenings, among many other activities, kicking off with an exhibition for which final details are currently being finalized.

50 years: from tree to forest

The exhibition in question is titled "It Was a Tree That Became a Forest. 50 Years of the Museo Universitario del Chopo," and will be open to the public from August 21 to December 7. It will feature around 480 objects in various formats, representing the first of several planned revisions of the museum's historical archive.

This was announced this Wednesday at El Chopo, attended by UNAM Culture Coordinator Rosa Beltrán; museum director Sol Henaro; and curator Karol Wolley, representing the curatorial team in charge of the exhibition.

“When we took on the responsibility of chronicling these 50 years of the museum, about a year ago, we felt it wasn't entirely appropriate to entrust the research and curatorship to a single agent. Therefore, a collective research approach was decided upon. We began by consulting our own collections: the documentary collection, the historical collection, the Disobedient Archive, the Fanzine Library, and, of course, the art collection,” stated Karol Wolley.

However, given the museum's historical significance and its connection to other movements and venues, a committee was appointed from within the museum to trace its influence in external collections and holdings, such as the National Newspaper Library, the Geology Archive, the Historical Archive of the Institute of Biology, the UNAM Film Library, the Arkheia Documentation Center, the National Sound Library, among others.

The result of this collaboration is not a chronological exhibition, but rather one based on four museological models. These are: an evocation of the cabinets of curiosities that became popular between the 16th and 17th centuries, to return to the site's former purpose as a Natural History Museum; an art salon, like the one collectors used to display the works in their possession during the 18th century, through which El Chopo proposes the coexistence of several of the very different artistic works that make up its collection, which to date consists of 368 pieces; a documentation center available for consultation; and, finally, a contemporary exhibition format for documents and art.

“A social center disguised as a museum”

The museum's director, Sol Henaro, shared: "When we were conducting research and reviewing the archives of Dr. Elena Urrutia (the museum's first director) at El Colegio de México, among many other things, we noticed that in the interviews she gave in the 1990s, she always referred to this place as a cultural center. That's when we realized that, indeed, it has always been a social center disguised as a museum."

For her part, UNAM Culture Coordinator Rosa Beltrán stated: “This is truly one of the museums that represents one of the greatest challenges: how to engage with your community (…) having a listening process and then putting it into practice is complex when you're an institution. And El Chopo is both: on the one hand, it's living culture, and on the other, the institution. The challenge lies in how to ensure that this doesn't become fossilized but rather becomes visible.”