DIORAMA: FIELD AND OFFICE WORK

The scenic device of dioramas, a form of display characteristic of natural history museums since the 19th century, inspires the scenographic representation of scientific practice presented here. The word means "to enter the scene" or "to see through the scene". This display consisted of reconstituting scenes from the lives of historical characters or animal species in their original environments. The featured characters and animals are usually wax sculptures or taxidermied animals, and in some cases, the lighting effects evoke the passage of time, day and night. Often natural-scale dioramas consist of a lighted box and display case, with a background painting and three-dimensional elements in the foreground. 

Showing the "spectacle of nature" or of "history", these representations intended to translate sensorial, in space and time, the state of scientific knowledge of the time and were primarily the result of the knowledge produced during the scientific expeditions undertaken by European scientists. The dioramas were, therefore, considered by natural history museums, pedagogical means and ways to promote ecological awareness. 

Heirs of the "cabinets of curiosities", the dioramas also embody the strange desire to dominate the world, literally putting it in a dome, an artificial and controllable world. They mirror a colonialist view of the world centred on the values and mentality of white European men.

We wanted to display the scientists themselves here instead of what was usual: the collection of their objects of study. We elected the attitude and gestures of these "measuring" scientists as our object of study.

The first form of the diorama was patented in 1822 by French landscape painter Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre (1781-1851), who would become, in 1839, one of the inventors of photography (the “daguerreotype").