Recovering the narrative, recovering memory, and recovering the past and present. These are the central themes of the exhibition Reversiones de la nación (Reversions of the Nation), which brings together artists from Ecuador and Bolivia. The exhibition focuses largely on questioning the systems of representation that operate within museums, institutions that collect histories to narrate them through images. Drawing on reflections from Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s sociology of the image, Rita Segato’s contributions on the concept of the nation, and Blanca Muratorio’s analysis of the representation of the "other," the works in this exhibition interrogate the ways in which historical narratives are constructed and the strategies of political erasure of the past through its reification and representation.
In this sense, the exhibition seeks to challenge historical narratives that reinforce a discriminatory, classist, and racist view of the impoverished peoples and communities inhabiting the territories upon which nations have been built. Ecuador and Bolivia are countries that have declared themselves as plurinational and intercultural nations and have questioned both their foundational processes and their colonial present. However, the narratives that are constantly constructed with the support of history and museographic devices continue to reaffirm a white and racist narrative. Recovering the memory that underpins this narrative becomes an urgent necessity to reclaim both the past and the present. Paraphrasing Ricoeur: power produces history; the people, memory.
What Ricoeur proposes is that the act of remembering has a cognitive component that allows us to revisit past experiences and bring them into the present. It is in the present where this exercise of memory is activated and re-signified—a present that has been seized by power through the construction of a hegemonic history. The artists in this exhibition, through video, performance, installation, sound, and ceramics, articulate discourses about this past and present, proposing alternative ways to recover memory and narrative. Their works juxtapose an immaculate and sanitized history against the complex reality with which history is constructed—a history that has been sweetened and stripped of its political and cognitive meaning.
Some works appropriate images of colonial heroes to reflect on the consequences of racism; others address the effects of extractivism on the cultures and peoples of the Amazon, facts that have been hidden in the wider national narrative. Sound experimentation and the revival of languages that have been lost to colonial processes are also part of this reflection, which denounces the racist mechanisms of erasure of ancestral and enslaved cultures in the formation of the Americas. Alongside the exhibition, a documentary film cycle and independent press reports have been organized to address exploitation and extractivism in the Ecuadorian Amazon, as well as their impact on these territories.