Until he got on a plane back to Mexico, Yosu Arangüena was not calm. There was googled how are the prisons in Vienna in case something went wrong. But the work was already done and no one seemed to have noticed. He, a publicist, 49 years old, and his partner Sebastián Arrechedera, a documentary filmmaker, 45 years old, had struck the coup for which they had been preparing for two years. friends had introduced thirty audio guides in the Ethnographic Museum of Vienna with an alternative story about the Headdress of Moctezuma, a pre-Hispanic object claimed by Mexico from Austria. Eight minutes in which the activist Xokonoschtletl Gómora, a descendant of Aztecs, tells his part of the story. “Like a museum robbery, but poorly done,” Arangüena jokes now, already sitting on the terrace of his house, more than 10,000 kilometers from the headdress. “A mexicanada”.
The two friends wanted to do something that “helped Mexico,” says Arangüena, adding: “Mexico is full of causes, problems and tragedies.” They chose that of the historical and cultural heritage scattered abroad, a collection looted centuries ago from the territory currently occupied by Mexico. And, specifically, the Moctezuma Plume, a headdress made of quetzal feathers and gold that came to Austria in some way that experts still do not know for sure. “For many people in this country [la pieza] it means a lot,” says Arangüena. This is how they arrived in Gómora, which in the last 40 years has taken the claim to the UN and has organized dozens of marches for this cause in different countries. “Our job was to carry their voice. Museums tell one side of the story, we want to tell the other side”, says the publicist.
Gómora recorded eight minutes of the story in Spanish, which was later dubbed into English and German. The problem was how to get the audio into the ears of the visitors without committing any crime: if they removed the original audio guides and replaced them with new ones, they would have been stealing, and if they pirated them, they would have infringed copyright. With the advice of lawyers, they chose the “legally less dangerous” option, that is, buying devices identical to those in the museum and introducing them little by little, on different days, so that it would not be noticed that there were more. And they chose to “play with the confusion”: they would introduce them in the morning so that with the change of shift the museum workers would believe that, perhaps, new ones had arrived while they were not there. In mid-February, they put the plan into motion.
Arangüena and Arrechedera took a photo with the facade of the Vienna Ethnographic Museum in the background before heading to the room where the headdress is located. They toured the facilities and, before leaving the building, they each left two devices, the original and the replica. Someone, when taking the second audio guide, will have heard the voice of Gómora: “For us Aztecs, this crown is the bearer of strength, power and wisdom of the sovereign Moctezuma. That’s why we want him back.”
Different governments of Mexico have claimed the piece on different occasions. The last one was in 2020, when the historian Beatriz Gutiérrez Müller, wife of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, traveled to Europe to ask countries like France, Germany or Italy for the temporary transfer of some objects. Gutiérrez Müller carried a letter in which the president asked his Austrian counterpart for the pre-Hispanic object and said: “We are not naive. It is known that not even Maximilian of Habsburg himself managed to get Moctezuma’s Headdress back to Mexico.” The answer was, as López Obrador could expect, no one more time. “This meeting was very unpleasant,” the president said of the meeting during a morning this February. A journalist had asked her about the action devised by Arangüena and Arrechedera, but she said nothing about that.
In total, the publicist and the documentary filmmaker came to infiltrate thirty devices for three weeks with the help of an international team that included Austrians, Syrians, Ukrainians or Germans. Museum visitors only heard Gómora’s voice when selecting audios 68 and 69, which correspond to her headdress; the rest had not been modified. In front of a sealed showcase that resists tremors and is embedded in the floor, Arangüena thinks he has seen some surprised faces of visitors who put the device to their ears, but he cannot confirm if it was just his imagination: “We couldn’t go to ask them”.
The headdress can be seen in the museum for free by Mexicans – it is estimated that between 2011 and 2020 more than 45,000 have visited it. Gómora, however, works every day for it to be exhibited in Mexico, according to what she says from Tabasco, where she lives: “It is a life task.” “I have to show that it can be done, and get our people dignity and pride, and mainly justice,” she says. But the headdress will not travel to Mexico, at least in the short term, because it could be destroyed in transit, according to the Viennese museum, based on the report that a group of Mexican and Austrian experts carried out between 2010 and 2012. Gómora replies in the audio : “We do not believe in that version (…) We have the technology to achieve it, it just takes will.”
The museum authorities, who were made aware of the action by the press after several devices had already been introduced into its rooms, insist that moving the plume could cause “enormous damage.” “We are aware of the latest technological advances,” the museum told EL PAÍS, “but at this time, technology does not offer a way to transport the headdress safely.” The introduction of alternative audio guides, however, seems to them “an interesting contribution to the current debate on post-colonial heritage in ethnographic museums”.
The debate on restitution is taking place. Germany announced that this year it would start returning “substantial quantities of the Benin bronzes,” busts and reliefs from the 16th and 17th centuries that were looted by British colonists and sold to various Western countries. French President Emmanuel Macron returned a batch of 26 artifacts to Benin in November. The Austrian deputy Petra Bayr, of the Social Democratic Party, has taken the debate to Parliament by introducing a motion to “reexamine”, ten years later, “if the supposedly technical reasons continue to hinder the return of the crown of feathers to Mexico”. “It corresponds to my sense of justice”, she wrote recently on your Facebook account. According to Gómora, this is the third time this has happened.
“That was already the icing on the cake. We did not expect it, and right now we are excited and we believe that we are going to achieve more. Well… surely we’re going to get here, but dreaming doesn’t cost”, says Arangüena. “People are willing to have dialogues and I think that the first museum that turns this around is going to change the world a lot,” he adds.
Arangüena, like Arrechedera, who is preparing a documentary about the experience, are just a “vehicle” in the action that both sponsored and whose total investment, he says, they have not yet calculated. “I can disagree with things that Xokonoschtletl says, but I do believe that it is the truth about him. Nobody’s version is totally true,” she notes. “I think the world has changed and that museums can be a little more responsible,” adds Arangüena. Vienna has not shown, for the moment, interest in discussing the property of the plume and its protection. But they will not initiate legal action against the publicist and the filmmaker because “the intervention did not cause any damage”. The creators of the confusion can continue calmly, while preparing the sequel.
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