Betlem Pallardó

Research 

Preserved animal bodies exist in a strange, unsettling space between the organic and the artificial, between the illusion of life and the certainty of death. As Samuel Alberti (2011) suggests, every mounted animal begins a cultural “afterlife”. They are not passive objects, but biographical artifacts born from what Rachel Poliquin (2012) calls a “culture of longing”—that is, a human desire to stop decay and possess nature. These ideas, obviously, raise questions: What kind of “nature” satisfies this longing? What stories are imposed upon animal bodies? What is remembered and what is forgotten? 

To answer these questions, my analysis draws on Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s concept of “archival silence”—the way institutions actively erase inconvenient histories (Trouillot, 1995: 48). In this case, the silenced stories are those of colonial violence, the commodification of life, and the transformation of sentient beings into objects. This erasure leads to what John Berger (1980) called the “disappearance” of the animal. Like in the zoo, the animal in the museum is removed from their world, overexposed, and reconstructed as a safe, consumable spectacle for the human gaze. 

METHODOLOGIES BEYOND THE VISUAL: FIELD RECORDINGS 

Museum Studies have traditionally privileged the visual. To challenge this sensory hierarchy and embrace a posthumanist, multispecies ethnographic perspective, my methodology deliberately moved beyond sight. 

This approach was put into practice through several key experiences during my scholarship. My theoretical discussions with Dr Charles Pigott were furthered by a collaboration with my fellow EARTH Scholar Janet Sit (University of California San Diego Music Department), who introduced me to the practice of field recording in multispecies encounters. Together, we travelled to Oban to record underwater sounds with a hydromoth (16th-17th May). 

 I further developed these skills at the “Sounding Out the Environment” workshop organized by Radiophenia at Glasgow Zine Fest (6th July). This experience provided practical training in advanced techniques (including binaural recording, geophones, and hydrophones) which I will apply to my museum research in Spain. 

THE POLITICS OF DISPLAY 

The EARTH Scholars cohort program offered hands-on opportunities to learn about museological practices of animal display and their socio-cultural implications. During a “Drift Workshop” at the St Andrews Scottish Ocean Institute (30th April), we collected items from the beach to curate our own exhibition. It was a practical exercise in how selection and presentation shape narratives regarding nature and other animals.  

 These reflections were deepened through research visits to institutions like the Inverness Museum and Art Gallery and the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow. At Kelvingrove, I encountered a particularly revealing exhibit in the “Scotland’s wildlife” section: a taxidermised “wild haggis”. The fact that this famously fictional creature was included among animals native to Scotland illustrates that museum installations are less about (re)presenting objective truths of nature and more about reflecting our own human cultural perspectives, values, and even humour. 

This creative aspect of natural history museums is not an anecdote, but institutional policy. Glasgow City Council’s recent development guide explicitly states that its museums may acquire “replicas, fakes etc, such as haggis, horned hares etc for display purposes as appropriate” (Glasgow City Council, 2024: 42). This demonstrates that museums are not neutral repositories, but active cultural devices—spaces of imagination where human ideas about nature are constructed and reinforced. 

TWO CASE STUDIES 

Building on that framework, my research focused on how these institutional narratives are both constructed and contested in Spanish culture. In this section, I will present two starkly contrasting case studies: the museum’s official self-representation in the documentary Evolución (‘Evolution’, Cuesta Hernando, 2022), and an impactful counter-narrative from the indie-rock song “Museo de historia natural” (‘Natural history museum’, Los Punsetes, 2014). 

Evolución 

 The documentary Evolución. 250 años del Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales (Cuesta Hernando, 2022) was produced by the Spanish National Museum of Natural Sciences for its 250th anniversary. As an institutional film, its primary goal is to celebrate the museum’s legacy and reinforce its authority, and it does so through different strategies.  

Visually, the film juxtaposes dramatic footage of living animals—often charismatic African megafauna evoking a colonial past—with shots of the museum’s halls, creating a false continuity that presents the museum as a natural extension of the wild. Within the museum, however, taxidermy animals are pushed to the background, subordinate to the human presence.  

Emotionally, the film frames species loss as a human-centered tragedy of nostalgia. When talking about an extinct thylacine, a biologist looks at the mounted animal and says: “A mí lo que me lleva estas cosas es a una mezcla de melancolía y de nostalgia por los ecosistemas que ya nunca veremos” (‘What these things bring up in me is a mix of melancholy and nostalgia for the ecosystems we’ll never see again’, 2022: 00:46) This is a perfect example of Poliquin’s “culture of longing.” The longing is not for the animal, but for the lost human experience of seeing it. The animal’s value is measured only by their availability to the human gaze. Here, the other-than-human subject is completely replaced with a human-centred emotional narrative. Moreover, the individual is nowhere to be seen; the biologist even uses the plural when objectifying: it’s not “esta cosa” (‘this thing’) but “estas cosas” (‘these things’). Taxidermy is a catalyst for human emotion, nothing more. 

Discursively, the film justifies the display of preserved bodies as an act of love towards nature. In this sense, the most revealing moment comes in an interview with Miguel Delibes de Castro, former director of the Doñana Biological Station and son of one of Spain’s most celebrated writers on nature. He fondly recalls: “Yo aprendí a querer a la naturaleza yendo de caza con mi padre” (‘I learned to love nature by going hunting with my father’, 2022: 00:33). Visually, this statement is framed with Delibes standing before a backdrop of blurred animal mounts reduced to set decoration. The camera’s composition mirrors the discursive strategy: the violence of hunting is neutralised and reframed as an essential, even noble, path to “loving nature,” making it seem not just acceptable, but necessary. This is the central function of the documentary: to launder violence through culture, science, and nostalgia. 

“Museo de Historia Natural” 

In stark contrast to the museum’s sanitised self-portrait, the song “Museo de Historia Natural” (Los Punsetes, 2014) subverts and dismantles the official narrative from within. It does so by giving voice to the silenced subjects of the museum, transforming the space from a site of wonder into one of ethical and corporeal discomfort. 

First, the song rejects the museum’s aseptic image by plunging the listener into a visceral, multi-sensory experience. The opening lines, “Cuando visité / el Museo de Historia Natural / Sentí un olor a viejo / […] / Sentí frío y miedo” (‘When I visited / the Natural History Museum / I smelled something old / I felt cold and fear’, 2014: v. 1-7), immediately establish the museum not as a neutral hall of knowledge, but as a place of decay and bodily distress. Putting the sensorial at the forefront grounds the critique in a physical reality and reminds us that this is a place filled with dead bodies. 

From this foundation of unease, the song shatters the archival silence by animating the supposed object of the exhibit. A robin is no longer a passive specimen but a subject who communicates through their gaze: “Me decía con los ojos / Yo no quise acabar así” (‘They told me with their eyes / I did not want to end up like this’, 2014: v. 11-12). The animal’s active and accusatory counter-gaze unsettles the human gaze, breaking the one-way spectacle and questioning the hegemonic narrative that rendered them silent. This exchange transforms the museum into a carceral space, where the animal is “Condenada a una eternidad” (‘Condemned to an eternity’, 2014: v. 15). Preservation is reframed, then, as a perpetual punishment. 

The other-than-human subject also questions their instrumentalization at the museum for pedagogical or ecological purposes. The lyrics are an explicit act of resistance: “No quiero que mi cuerpo / Sirva a nadie más / […] / Ni a las nuevas generaciones / Que vengan por detrás / Y que haya que educar” (‘I don’t want my body / To serve anyone else / […] / Not even the new generations / That come after / And must be educated’, 2014: v. 19-26). This is a powerful assertion of bodily autonomy that persists after death, a direct challenge to the anthropocentric idea that an animal’s body must serve a human purpose. 

Finally, the song culminates in a haunting chorus where the narrative voice dissolves into a collective of the dead. The specific species—the bald eagle, the seals, the pandas—blur into a shared identity with the human narrator (“Y yo”, ‘And I’, 2014: v. 27), creating a community united by their unwilling presence in the museum. Their shared chant, “Solo quiero estar muerto” (‘I just want to be dead’, 2014: v. 28), is the ultimate rejection of the “cultural afterlife” celebrated by the institution. They desire not a curated eternity as a spectacle, but the finality and peace of true death.

CONCLUSION 

As these case studies show, neither taxidermy installations nor their cultural representations are neutral. On one hand, institutional products like Evolución work to manage our discomfort with exhibiting mounted animals by carefully constructing a spectacle that erases the individual animal and their history. On the other hand, critical works of culture like “Museo de Historia Natural” tear down this façade, giving voice to the animals and exposing the institution as a site of violence and unease.  

Therefore, this research advocates for a fundamental shift. The goal is not to close museums, but to transform them into genuinely critical institutions. This requires us to ask uncomfortable questions: Why was this specific individual killed? What is the history embedded in this object? And by what right do we continue to display it as a trophy? Ultimately, a truly antispeciesist museum must move beyond critique and towards restorative action. It requires us to imagine a future where the bodies of these individuals are no longer held as objects of spectacle. The task is to build a museum that has the courage to finally let them go. And culture is a powerful critical tool to help us achieve that.

REFERENCES 

Alberti, Samuel J. M. M., ed. (2011). The Afterlives of Animals: A Museum Menagerie. University of Virginia Press. 

Berger, John (1980). “Why Look at Animals?”. In About Looking. Writers and Readers Publishing. 

Cuesta Hernando, Mario (director) (2022). Evolución. 250 años del Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales [Documentary]. Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales de Madrid (MNCN-CSIC). 

Glasgow City Council (2024). Glasgow Life Museums Collections Development Policy 2024-2029. 

Los Punsetes (2014). “Museo de Historia Natural”. LPIV. CANADA Editorial. 

Poliquin, Rachel (2012). The Breathless Zoo: Taxidermy and the Cultures of Longing. The Pennsylvania State University Press. 

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph (1995). Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Beacon Press.