On 10 December 2021, the three researchers went to present SciCoMove at the Historical Museum and the Ameghino House in Luján.
The Complejo Museográfico Provincial Enrique Udaondo incorporates the Museo Colonial e Histórico, which has a very interesting history. Founded by Enrique Udaondo (1880–1962) in 1918, this museum grew out of the transformation of its founder’s private collection into a public one; later its collections have been expanded through numerous donations and purchases of other private collections gathered by national history amateurs. Udaondo himself is quite a representative of amateur scholars, who collected the past often in a troubled political context and with partisan intentions. Belonging to the conservative circles, he collected traces of Argentina’s “colonial” past and did not radically oppose this past to the history of Argentina after its independence (María Elida Blasco, Un museo para la colonia. El Museo Histórico y Colonial de Luján, Rosario, Prohistoria ediciones, 2011). This scholar can be compared to his French counterparts who collected traces of France’s pre-revolutionary past after 1789 and whose private collections often enriched national or local public museums, such as the Musée Carnavalet in Paris (see Tom Stammers, The Purchase of the Past: Collecting Culture in Post-Revolutionary Paris c.1790–1890, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2020). Exchanges with the museum’s management team were very productive and allowed to widen the reach of the SciCoMove project. The Historical Museum might be interested in the virtual exhibition prototype that will be produced at the end of the project, as well as in the MOOC for its staff.

Luján is also the city where the family of the naturalist Florentino Ameghino (1853–1911), coming from Italy, settled when he was still an infant. This paleontologist, author of a theory that made Argentina the cradle of the human species, was transformed into an Argentine national hero (Irina Podgorny, “Florentino Ameghino entre Luján et Moscou (1911–1954)”, Revue d’histoire des sciences humaines, 36/2020, 79-102, https://doi.org/10.4000/rhsh.4654; Irina Podgorny, Florentino Ameghino y Hermanos, Buenos Aires, Edhasa, 2021). His family home has become a small museum. The SciCoMove researchers met the museum team, and Irina Podgorny and Nathalie Richard were interviewed for a video dedicated to Ameghino on the city’s website. This visit was an opportunity to present the SciCoMove project and the local press reported on it.

OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Nathalie Richard (January 11, 2022). Irina Podgorny, Silvano Montaldo and Nathalie Richard at the museums of Luján. SciCoMove — Scientific Collections on the Move. Retrieved April 28, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/tws6