Isabel Muñoz, one of the great photographers of our time, returns to the MNA after “Women of the Congo” (2017). Now she presents her latest major project, which offers us a look with profound anthropological values ​​on the formation of Neolithic societies through her impressive photographs of four archaeological sites in Anatolia: Göbekli Tepe, Karahan Tepe, Nevali Çori and Sayburç. In recent years, excavations in these “sanctuaries” have not ceased to surprise us with discoveries that are changing what we knew about societies in the transition between nomadism and sedentarization: their chronology, their organization and their ways of life, their megalithic constructions, their artistic manifestations and their concept of “the sacred”.

This exhibition opens the special programme for the 150th anniversary of the National Museum of Anthropology (1875-2025), and thus evokes its early stages of life, when it was also a Museum of Prehistory. In fact, the project now connects the MNA with three major museums dedicated to the dawn of humanity: the Pera Museum in Istanbul and the Museum of Civilisations in Ankara, where it began its journey, and the National Museum of Altamira, where it will arrive in the spring of next year. The Altamira Museum was once the destination of most of the MNA's prehistoric collection, as part of the objects, mostly stone tools collected throughout the 19th century at different archaeological "sites", came from Cantabria.

In this way, the exhibition closes a kind of “magic circle” while opening a period of renovation for the museum. The powerful images created by Isabel Muñoz serve to look back to a remote past, but they challenge us from the most vibrant contemporaneity, and connect us with questions that are still very relevant. After all the path that humanity has traveled since then, are we really different in essence from the people who created and used those sacred spaces 9,000 years ago? Have we forgotten fundamental things about our relationship with the cosmos that those people knew and felt? Is it possible, by connecting with the intangible dimension of those creations thanks to the mediation of Isabel Muñoz, that we can rediscover something of that lost essential identity? There is only one way to find out…