Magazines - Tribal Art Winter 2009

By Francisco de Santos

Introduction
Renovation work in the storage areas of the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Madrid has made it possible for nine Fang reliquary ancestor figures (byeri) from Equatorial Guinea to be put on display through January 2010, alongside the six byeri that are already on view as part of the permanent collection. The opportunity to see this important installation, which represents almost a third of the museum’s Fang holdings, is a first for our institution, where we strive to rotate the display of collections in order to better study and preserve them. This display would not have been possible without the research that has been conducted on the museum’s African collection since its 2004 renovation, notably the identification and documentation done by Baladrón Angeles, and technical support for the exhibition by Mario Oliva.
The museum’s byeri collection is the result of various Spanish marine voyages and expeditions in the area at the end of the nineteenth century, as well as gifts and purchases made at the beginning of the twentieth century. Information obtained on objects collected in situ, along with museum accession documentation, offers valuable chronological insights on these objects, whose creation dates may be substantially earlier than their collection dates.