This intervention in the Andes room explores community approaches to the pre-Hispanic past, challenging the hierarchies between scientific and folk knowledge in museums.
The coast of Ecuador, which is an important archaeological site, has experienced a culture of national and international plundering with the participation of scientists, amateurs and museums. A subsistence economy and an artisan practice of replicating these objects have existed in La Pila parish since the 1960s. For this project, local artists who are experts in pre-Columbian pottery have recreated pre-Hispanic objects from La Pila belonging to one of the museum’s first collections. This thus creates a connection between old pieces and their replicas, which questions the modern vision of originality and enables us to imagine the uses and sounds of these objects, including several whistles.
The inauguration of what was then called the Ethnological and Colonial Museum in 1949 reflects the Franco regime’s effort to maintain an imperialistic discourse in Europe. The main collections included the pieces from La Pila, which the Barcelona City Council had acquired from Leopoldo Gómez Alonso. Although he was from Cantabria, Spain, he lived in Quito and collected archaeological animal specimens and objects. He left a photographic archive from his journeys to Ecuador in the 1930s and 1940s that contains the oldest snapshot of La Pila, which is crucial to the community’s social memory. Now, as part of this project, this archive is being displayed at the La Pila Historical and Artisan Museum community centre.
Whistling Time is part of the artist Pamela Cevallos’s extensive collaboration with the community of La Pila, with the goal of showcasing the artisan pottery craft of archaeological replicas and collectively exploring the stories of transatlantic collecting. All the pieces in the room are oriented towards the window, looking onto the Picasso Museum to instigate notions of geniality and originality and the concept of primitivism from that era and to challenge spectators about their own imaginaries.

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María Iñigo Clavo, curator