In the 19th Century, Swiss naturalist and explorer Johann Jakob von Tschudi travelled, as many other Europeans of his time, to Peru, Bolivia and Brazil. There, he collected a variety of objects and captured over six-hundred animals – seven of them currently named after him. Rather than studying these specimens by observing them in their natural habitat, he dissected each one of them to study their anatomy. In 1858, he took the sacred figurine of Ekeko from the indigenous Aymara community – which was then exhibited at Bern History Museum until 2014 when it was returned to the Bolivian State. Ekeko represented the God of Abundance.

For Liste 2024, The Ryder proposes a solo presentation by Chilean-Peruvian artist Ivana de Vivanco comprising a series of paintings, sculptures, drawings and photographs that revolve around Ivana’s current investigations on Swiss explorer von Tschudi. The project departs from her current commission by the Natural History Museum in Neuchâtel (MHNN) and the Neutchätel Centre d’Art (CAN). Curated by Denise Bertschi and Tomás Bartoletti, the exhibition "Naming Natures: A Transdisciplinary Exhibition on Natural History and its Colonial Legacy" will be shown in late 2024.

The explorer’s legacy – and its importance within the MHNN museum’s collection - is for the artist an example on how the Euro-Capitalistic idea of science and progress was, and still is, a methodology for labelling Latin American nature and culture. In this way, her project addresses the conflictive past of natural history museums. Investigating the current displays at MHNN – reminiscent of the cabinet of curiosities and still including the von Tschudi‘s broad collection of dissected animals – de Vivanco creates a narrative that challenges the normative and surgical forms of understanding nature. To do so, she shifts the point of view to create a museum-like narrative with her works, privileging a particular Latin American tradition that, despite relating to nature respectfully, has always been seen by western culture as primitive and mystical.

The Ekeko – the Aymara God of Abundance once stolen by von Tschudi – takes protagonism in Ivana’s configuration within the context of the Alasitas, a popular festivity from Bolivia and Peru. The Alasitas, which in Aymara means “buy me”, are fairs where locals joyfully exchange miniatures, agricultural products and colourful stones with the hope of having, during the coming year, the acquired products. Some of them are reproductions of animals and plants that are placed nearby the Ekeko sculpture; an act of giving and taking that holds a respectful communion with nature.

With her hallucinatory, dark, decadently colourful and utterly compelling palette, Ivana de Vivanco’s project aims to create a dialogue between the ancestral and the scientific, presenting Latin American forms of relating with nature in the same way as the “so called” science. The dissected nature of von Tschundi’ collection of animals finds its parallel with the characteristic theatricality of the artist’s practice, interrogating the Swiss explorer by the actual object of his study, nature. While von Tschundi understood nature as something to dissect, study and display, Ivana’s project venerates ancestral ways of seeing nature as a place to inhabit and protect.