WORKSHOP | Escutar Réplicas com Pamela Cevallos
November 24th 2025, 6 PM
Free entry.
Registration via email hangarcia.production@gmail.com
Up to 15 participants.
Hangar – Centro de Investigação Artística
Still from the film Cómo liberar un pájaro, 2025. © Pamela Cevallos
As part of the exhibition Currents of Restitution: Abolish the Museum, opening at HANGAR on November 27th 2025, we invite you to a workshop with artist Pamela Cevallos.
Pamela takes part in the exhibition with the work Cómo liberar un pájaro [How to Liberate a Bird, 2025]. In this video, she continues her research on Ecuadorian archaeological collections, focusing on pre-Hispanic ceramic instruments from Manabí, Ecuador, which today remain untouched in the storage rooms of Western museums. Adopting the format of an ironic restitution tutorial, the video shows the artist Javier Rivera shaping a clay moñudo — a bird native to the fauna of La Pila, his hometown. The object is inspired by a whistle kept at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge, United Kingdom. These “caged” wind instruments become interlocutors in a dialogue about the colonial history of collections and the violence of preservation, questioning how museums define legitimacy, authenticity and value.
In the workshop Listening to Replicas, we follow the instructions of Javier and the artist to create our own clay moñudo. These pre-Columbian whistles will remain part of the exhibition until it closes, after which they may be taken home by their creators.
Pamela Cevallos (1984, Quito) is a visual artist, anthropologist, and curator whose practice builds bridges between contemporary art and ethnographic research. Her work examines the tensions between institutional frameworks of heritage and community forms of reappropriation. Since 2015, she has collaborated with the community of La Pila (Manabí, Ecuador), valuing pre-Hispanic ceramic replicas as critical tools for questioning authenticity and activating alternative relationships with the past. Through installations, painting, and collaborative projects, Cevallos explores the social life of objects and the politics of archives. She exhibited at the 22nd Bienal Sesc_Videobrasil, São Paulo (2023) and at the 15th and 14th Cuenca Biennials (2021, 2019), having received the Paris Prize (2023) and the Mariano Aguilera Prize (2017). She has undertaken residencies at the Delfina Foundation, London; Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris; and MeetFactory, Prague. She currently teaches at the Pontifical Catholic University of Ecuador.