Foreign interest in Mesoamerican culture has been strong since colonial times and continues today, with explorers, governments, and private individuals accumulating pre-Hispanic collections through scientific expeditions and diplomatic gifts, encouraging the removal of these objects for a rapidly expanding market. The reaction has been the extraction of “original” Mesoamerican pieces that have ended up in cultural institutions in other countries, where they remain safeguarded, never to return to their places of origin. Currently, hundreds of thousands of pre-Hispanic pieces originating in Mesoamerica form part of the largest collections and museums around the world, which, hand in hand with growing demand from the entities involved —government agencies, cultural institutions, the private and public markets, among others— have promoted the production of replicas, copies, and fakes for various purposes, redefining the material and symbolic possession and recovery of these cultural objects.

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Original copies ot the art of the steal proposes the use of emerging digital technologies, together with traditional reproduction techniques, as an alternative means of repatriation, generating identical and historically accurate copies to be presented for the first time in Mexico. The exhibition challenges institutional notions of ownership and appropriation associated with heritage collecting practices worldwide, as well as the legal framework that justifies them. Presenting canonical pieces of Mesoamerican culture housed in some of Europe's largest collections—the British Museum in London, the Museum of the Americas in Madrid, and the Vatican Museum in Vatican City—as well as collections in the United States and Asia—the Peabody Museum at Yale in New Haven, LACMA in Los Angeles, and the Fujisawa Ukiyo-e Museum in Fujisawa— Original copies questions the museum space, the capabilities of technological reproducibility in our time, and the apparatus of international collecting. The exhibition navigates the legal loopholes of heritage reproduction—authorized or unauthorized—showing the current potential for democratizing access to cultural heritage through the use of digital tools as a means of cultural activism and heritage recovery.

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In museums and other institutional settings, copies have been used to study and reconstruct lost artifacts in order to protect the originals. However, in the field of historical preservation, they are often considered a last resort, after efforts to save the original have failed. The battles to save and, more recently, recover the originals—the authentic ones—uphold the idea of preserving prototypes so that future generations can see what the past was really like. These ideas, together with the emergence of the market and the exploitation of the uniqueness of originals, began to establish a hierarchy between the “authentic” work and the copy, paying little attention to how the copy can offer an “original” contribution in its own right, or how it can alter or enhance the understanding of the object to which it refers.