Indigenous Names of the Coca Plant

Artist’s country of origen: Colombia
Materials: Crushed coca plant seed on paper
Medium: Installation, Print / Graphic Work
Size: 113 x 400 cm
Year: 2021

Díaz uses pigment made from crushed coca-seeds to inscribe, on paper the myriad of indigenous names for coca. The work juxtaposes the botanical taxonomy developed under colonial modernity with the vernacular vocabularies of Andean and Amazonian communities, making visible how language and power have long mediated the fate of a single plant. 

Through its material and symbolic form the piece asks us to reconsider how the coca plant has been framed: first within scientific classification and then as an illicit commodity. By reclaiming the plant’s own seeds as pigment, Díaz re-centers indigenous epistemologies, restoring the leaf’s rootedness in cultural knowledge rather than only its exploitation in the war on drugs.