Pamela Cevallos, Efervescencia, intervention in the Ecuadorian archaeology exhibition at the Quai Branly Museum, Paris, 2022.
31 July 2024
By Ana Salazar Herrera
Contributing to urgent debates on how to reimagine the museum from decolonial perspectives and expanding on the needs for restitution and reparation after centuries of colonialism, the outstanding work of Ecuadorian artist and researcher Pamela Cevallos challenges and subverts the essence of the museum itself. In the last ten years, her practice—spanning drawing, painting, sculpture, and installation—has engaged with the artifices of the museum, questioning what is behind the arbitrary choices of inclusion and exclusion. Cevallos is interested in the opaque gesture of putting objects in vitrines, lighting them in a certain way to guide our attention, while hiding other objects or not giving correct information about the objects’ origins. In particular, her research has focused on how notions of originality and authenticity impart objects with value within the field of art, also linked to property and provenance.
In 2015, Cevallos’ investigative process led her to a community of artisans in Manabí, Ecuador, called La Pila, which is Spanish for fountain, as it has a large pre-Hispanic well that provides water for the entire village and contains traces of ceramic, stone, and gold objects from pre-Hispanic cultures. This community became famous from the late 1960s onwards as a place of “huaquería”—a derogative term for the activity of illegally extracting objects from archaeological sites to sell to collectors and museums in the “grey market” (black market for antiques)—and forgeries of pre-Hispanic sculptures. These new subsistence strategies, which partly replaced farming, were born from the public and private collections boom that Ecuador was experiencing after the Central Bank stopped melting archaeological gold to make lingots and instead opened the first National Museum in Quito in 1969. The economic and cultural value of the objects came together to create this collection, and advertisements circulated when the museum announced that it was buying archaeological objects and art. Many communities started looking for pieces to sell to state and private collections, having been largely criminalised and stigmatised for their activities. For Cevallos however, the way in which the artisans of La Pila deal with “las cositas de los antíguos” (the little things of our ancestors) reveals itself as a way of appropriating the past without complying to nationalist narratives about authorised heritage. The local communities have found different ways to directly engage with the extracted objects, opening up alternative possibilities for rethinking the past in the present and creating diverse futures.
The knowledge of the artisans of La Pila is immense. The disdainfully called huaqueros and forgers actually know plenty about their ancestors’ art, history, and the found objects themselves. Unfortunately, that knowledge has systematically been dismissed, the objects stolen and taken to museums and collections internationally, and the inhabitants of La Pila and other local communities continue to be excluded from official knowledge producing institutions. To counter such colonial and racist logic that still pervades the country, Cevallos collaborated with the community of La Pila to open the Museo Histórico y Artesanal La Pila (Museum of History and Artisanship La Pila) as her participation in the Mariano Aguilera Prize in 2018. This communal museum, for which artisans of La Pila donated their pieces, is a live archive of La Pila’s memories and histories, as well as a platform that values the profession of converting clay and stone into art. In the last three years, artisans have given workshops to the younger generation to transmit their crafts. In 2024, the museum received support from the Memories in Movement project by Ecuador’s National Institute of Cultural Heritage, making it possible to renew the research and promote the creation of new works that recount the stories of the artisans. This long-term pedagogical project not only honours the crafts, ancestral knowledge, and identity of La Pila, but also blurs the distinction of art and artisanship—the artisans are all artists and no longer stay anonymous.
Another recent example of how Cevallos has been thinking about restitution in innovative ways is the work Corrientes de retorno (Currents of return) from 2021-23, where she collaborated with artist Javier Rivera from La Pila to create a collection of sculptures that replicate the “Gigantes de Bahía”. These archaeological pieces were found at Los Esteros Beach in Manta by a child in 1966 and received their name because of their rare scale, with a height of up to one meter. Being desirable objects, museums and collections in the country as well as throughout Europe and the USA took their giants, and the more than 3000 pieces disappeared quickly. Rivera is a second-generation artisan who replicates pre-Hispanic ceramics, while exploring their artistic potential through form and colour. After a research phase of visiting some of the sculptures for the first time, as well as choosing pieces from black-and-white catalogue images from foreign museums, Rivera reinterpreted several Gigantes. These new sculptures have some variations from the documented ones, such as their facial expressions, but also propose a novel approach to colour. The objects thus return to their land through the act of reproduction, bringing back the knowledge that has been stored away, but speaking from the present and imagining futures through contemporary and local aesthetics.
The brilliant twist is that the replica is the original. On the one hand, replicas refer to originals, on the other, they can respond to the originals, saying something different. While replicas can help us understand the significance of the original objects, as well as allow for a different kind of relation since we can touch them and be near them without vitrines, the museum is still afraid of replicas. For Cevallos, the replica represents a political potential to salvage heritage, while disturbing the western principles of originality and authenticity. The first artisans of La Pila, for instance, used the original pre-Hispanic moulds they found to produce replicas. Is it still a replica if they used the original mould? Reproducibility was already latent in these objects. The power of the replica also lies in being able to reimagine and contest what official institutions like museums and universities have affirmed about the past. All replication involves an act of originality and creativity to build bridges between the past and the present.
The Nigerian-British artist Yinka Shonibare also worked with replicas in his installation Monument to the Restitution of the Mind and Soul (2023), part of this year’s Nigerian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. The installation features a pyramidal structure with clay replicas of the “Benin Bronzes.” These bronzes were taken to Britain as war booty from the 1897 Benin Expedition. Shonibare uses these replicas to highlight the theft of cultural memory and reclaim these objects for Nigerian communities. Among the sculptures, he placed a bust of Sir Harry Rawson, painted in Batik style, inside a vitrine mimicking the display of Western museums, denouncing how European “world museums” contributed to legitimising the theft of cultural objects from the colonies.
It was on three of such “world museums” that Cevallos conducted research during her residency at Delfina Foundation in London, from April to June 2024. She researched the collections of Ecuadorian artefacts, finding in total more than 800 pieces from the Manabí region at the British Museum in London, the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge, and the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. From these three, only the latter had Ecuadorian objects included in their permanent exhibitions. While navigating these spaces, she encountered not only a pervasiveness of discourses about the “discoveries” of “distant” and “exotic” lands and cultures omnipresent, but also a reverence of the individual, western subject—he who travelled to non-European places and brought back knowledge through the vicious gesture of stealing objects and presenting them as trophies. The museums have the urgent and critical task to correct racist comparisons between “primitives” and “civilization,” as well as be respectful towards, and much more knowledgeable about, the objects and cultures they are putting on display. In the British Museum, Cevallo found Ecuadorian objects that had been donated in the 1920s, that had never been reopened from their Canadian chocolate boxes. Many objects had not been indexed or maintained their original cataloguing with outdated categories such as “grotesque”. Among other highlights of the artist’s findings in London is an archive of letters from the 1930s that document in detail how some of the objects, although being protected heritage and therefore not allowed to leave the country, had been trafficked into the UK, as well as objects from La Pila, including a Manteño monolith.
It is truly invaluable to have an artist accessing these collections and casting her perspective on objects that have been wilfully neglected. Cevallos might be able to infuse back some of the value that these objects lost the moment they were taken away from their original land. Her findings and methodologies can also enrich and inspire the museums themselves. The artist’s new research will certainly be generative of a new series of works inspired by the connection between the past and the present, which is already alive in La Pila and other local communities. A powerful example of how encaged “original” objects can never be truly representative of the culture they come from are the ceramic sound objects from Manabí that were intended to be played (wind instruments) or put in water. These instruments were often overlooked as they also have visual themes. When coming across these, Cevallos recorded their sound to create an archive. Whichever ideas will be developed from the gathered material, they will most probably result in collective projects, involving archaeologists and historians, as well as artisans and other practitioners. As Cevallos says in regards to the fact that the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac in Paris displays a forgery of a Manteño stone seat as if it were the original—“La Pila is already there, part of the canon”.