Tawna and Oscar Santillán

Ecuador announces that it will be represented at the 61st Venice Biennale by Tawna and Oscar Santillán. The Pavilion of Ecuador is curated by Manuela Moscoso.

Tawna & Oscar brings together two practices shaped by Amazonian and Andean territories, each engaging forms of knowledge, relation, and imagination that have long remained outside the terms through which Western modernity has sought to define the world. The exhibition does not propose a single narrative or a unified image of Ecuador. Instead, it brings into proximity distinct ways of inhabiting and sensing the present, attending to what dominant systems have ignored, rendered invisible, or refused to recognize as fully real.

The project unfolds through a shared concern with worlds that persist beyond the authority of classification, extraction, and separation. In Tawna’s work, memory, dreaming, sexuality, and communal life emerge as forces through which relations to territory are sustained and renewed. In Oscar Santillán’s work, speculation becomes a way of approaching realities that exceed inherited distinctions between the natural and the artificial, the ancestral and the technological, the visible and the unknown. Together, their practices open a space in which imagination is not escape, but a means of composition: a way of giving form to life otherwise, and of remaining attentive to what continues beyond capture.

Tawna is an anticolonial collective formed by Sápara, Kichwa, and mestizx artists who create from the rainforest as a territory of memory, resistance, and vision. Founded in 2017, their practice explores video, photography, and the living archive to reimagine narratives through the oneiric, the ritual, and the embodied. Tawna, named after the ancestral tool that propels the canoe, connects territories, affects, and futures from a Pan-Amazonian perspective. The members of the collective are Sani Montahuano, Enoc Merino, Boloh Miranda, Mukutsawa Montahuano, Lucía Ferré, Ipiak Ushigua, and Tatiana Lopez. Their work consists of multidisciplinary pieces, as well as pedagogical processes with Amazonian communities that converge toward the creation of their own narratives—intimate, collective, and experimental—grounded in their territories.

Oscar Santillán is an Ecuadorian artist whose practice brings together science, speculative thought, and ancestral knowledge to explore how life, matter, and intelligence are imagined across human and nonhuman worlds. Through what he has termed “Antimundo,” his work brings together a diverse ecology of knowledge producers, ranging from scientists to beings beyond the human. His projects often unfold through research-driven processes that move between disciplines. By unsettling dominant systems of knowledge, Santillán opens spaces for alternative ways of knowing that foreground relationality and the limits of Western taxonomy.

Manuela Moscoso is an Ecuadorian curator, researcher and writer based in New York. She is the inaugural Executive and Artistic Director of CARA, Center for Art, Research and Alliances, and curator of the 2ª Bienal das Amazônias (2025).

Graphic and architectural design for the pavilion is by Studio Manuel Raeder, a Berlin-based designer working across exhibition architecture, editorial design, and visual identity.

Production and international PR for the pavilion are led by TAtchers’ Art Management, an international art production and research organization, under the direction of Anna Shvets. 

An initiative of the Vice Ministry of Culture of Ecuador, led by Vice Minister Romina Muñoz Procel and the executive and artistic director of MAAC, Stephanie García Albán.