La Tala

with Oscar Enríquez

First Prize, 65th Salón de Julio
Museo Municipal de Guayaquil, Guayaquil

Oil and oil pastel on unprimed canvas · polyptych, four panels, 2026

​

La Tala begins with a Manteño-Huancavilca totem that today is kept in the Museo Municipal de Guayaquil and that once stood upright in a forest. Between those two states lies a cut. The work proposes that this uprooting does not precede patrimony but produces it: there is no heritage object without a prior felling that severs it from its world. To conserve is to have torn away.

To enter the collection, the vitrine, the narrative of a culture, the object must be extracted from the place and the use that gave it meaning. The totem that receives the visitor is there, intact, monumental, and at the same time no longer anywhere.

In this work the archive amplifies a gaze that conserves by fixing, that cares by arresting, for which to document and to exhibit, dispossession and custody, are the same. Both the diorama that fictions a past and the label by which we now name it are inventions that come after the cut: layers of the same felling.