The starting point of this story is a box of chocolates that, instead of sweets, holds what might be considered the greatest delight for a collector: ancient objects from unknown cultures. The word confite evokes those small candies, but it also alludes to collecting as a gluttonous act.
In her recent explorations through English museums, Pamela Cevallos found this box and pre-Hispanic objects from the ancient peoples who once inhabited what is now Ecuador. However, her interest goes beyond the pieces themselves: she seeks to reconnect with those who created them, with the communities to which they originally belonged, and with the places from which they came.
The collector who owned the chocolate box was also a traveler who embodies one of the stereotypes of the modern intellectual in the Western tradition. He was Dr. J.O. Bosworth, an Englishman who, in 1920, sold to the British Museum a series of objects acquired in 1918 in Manta, mostly small ceramic spindles from Manabí.
Curiously, the chocolate box was Canadian, from the Ganong brand. Thus, this story is not only about the exchange of objects —chocolates for archaeological pieces?— but, above all, about the circulation of symbolic and cultural capital.
In the archives, Cevallos recovered the provenance story of these goods: it was children who gave the objects to the Englishman, calling them little tops. That was precisely how they used them; they played with them after finding them in the soil or on the beach. In this way, these objects take on an everyday dimension, far from the compulsive storage of modern museums, where they often remain forgotten and hidden from the public. This is the shift the artist seeks to make in these stories: a return to those children, their games, the original makers, and those who have adapted these objects to give them new uses in a continuous becoming.
The clay objects begin to associate in Cevallos’s mind with the chocolate that once filled that box. This leads us into a world of associations—a symbolic staging: small-format works arranged in a labyrinthine path that evokes the colors of that chocolate box preserved in the British Museum’s storage.
Her work incorporates fragments of iconic paintings such as The Cornfield by John Constable (1826) and references to The Monkey Painter by Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin (1739–1740), which presents the allegory of the painter as imitator.
In this new project, the narrative does not aim for a definitive conclusion but instead invites the viewer to participate in an endless game in which each gaze reveals new layers of interpretation. The exhibition unfolds as a box of boxes—a perpetual game in which history, in constant transformation, comes alive.

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Giada Lusardi, curator