Pamela Cevallos, is an artist and academic based in Quito. Cevallos work usually links social and comunal rooted work with ethnographic and academical research. This has taken her to build long term relationships with some communities of artisans in Ecuador, while at the same time developed a critic of mussiest institution and private art collections, linking somehow this two very different worlds. For this exhibition the artists presents a commissioned work, which comes from a wider research around Comunidad La Pila in Ecuador, where she proposed to build a communal museum around the pieces that local artisans have created. This pieces have specific characteristic: they are “copy-cats” of original arqueological pieces founded in that region, from where they usually are traded legally and illegally for private and public national collections. This artisans support their families with the selling of this replicas to local and international tourists. What Cevallos proposes is a radical reinterpretation of objects around notions of replica and original, while raise sensitive questions around cultural heritage, national nostalgia and social classes in contemporary Ecuador. What we see on the walls are digital printings of those replicas, signed in some cases by the artistas from La Pila.
 
Pablo José Ramírez, curator