The things that were Temporary exhibition

In these coloured plates, as though the glass were a store of memories, we see the child who has excelled, their application to their studies, the neatness of the homework handed in. The Engler viscometer, designed for measuring the viscosity of a liquid, takes us back to a distant past reality, those laboratories, those group experiments with noses glued to the apparatus, eyes wide open, straining to see beyond their small world. The wooden box has fifty compartments for storing the rubber stamps with the names of the subjects taught at the Institut in the last century. Fifty names, from fifty worlds. The drum with the little balls for assigning the examination questions takes us back to that imposing setting where the exam took place, the solemnity of the examiners, the stark quandaries that transfixed the students, a veritable rite of passage that Western culture had designed as a kind of passport to the serious world of adults. The bottles contained a sample of pure and mixed substances based on the 118 chemical elements. Laboratory utensils, in all shapes and colours, which, like toy cooking utensils for secondary school students in their final year, were the thread between a childhood about to be left behind and an adult life still on the horizon of uncertainty.

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All the objects here come from Girona's Institut d'Ensenyament Mitjà (secondary school) which, between 1869 and 1968, occupied the building that today houses the History Museum. The collection is made up of items used in the classrooms and laboratories and responsibility for their conservation is shared between the Museum and the current Institut Jaume Vicens Vives, which took over from the old secondary school in 1969.