Damiana Kryygi

Overview

The year is 1896. In the dense jungle of Paraguay a three years old Ache girl survives a slaughter perpetrated by white settlers. The girl is named Damiana by her captors. Anthropologists from the La Plata Museum of Natural Sciences in Argentina take her as an object of scientific interest in the context of their racial studies. Later she is handed over to a family where she grows up as a maid. In 1907, at the age of 14, she is committed to a mental institution. There she is photographed naked just two months before her death from tuberculosis. Once dead her body is studied in La Plata and in Berlin. One hundred years later, an anthropology student identifies part of her remains in the La Plata museum. Her head is found soon after at Charite Hospital in Berlin.