If it’s Bayer, it’s good
Edinson Quiñones
Artist’s country of origen: Colombia
Materials: Digital Print
Size: 100 x 80 cm
Year: 2017
Line of Inquiry:
In the work If it’s Bayer, it’s good, Quiñones appropriates the symbol of the German company to point to the role of the European and North American pharmaceutical industry in stripping the sacred coca leaf of its ancestral meaning. Since the extraction of the psychoactive alkaloid cocaine by european scientist, the plant became of popular use for scientific purposes, as anaesthesia in dental surgeries (although later replaced with less risky substances).
Following the mid-19th-century extraction of cocaine from the coca leaf by German chemists Gaedcke and Niemann in around 1860s, the plant entered European scientific and medical pharmaceutical industry. This chemical research enabled companies such as Merck and Bayer to commercialize isolated plant compounds, transforming coca from a sacred Andean plant into an industrial medical substance.
The Artist
Edinson Quiñones
Edinson Javier Quiñones Falla Campo Zemanate is an artist of Nasa descent, born in La Plata, Huila (Colombia) in 1982. He holds a BFA in Visual Arts and a Master’s degree in Arts Integrated with the Environment from the University of Cauca.
