Las Yerbas Apothecary
Curated by
Liana Collective
Location
Liana’s Summer Residency at Canal Projects, New York
Date
July – October 2023
Las Yerbas Apothecary was an interspecies research space developed by Liana Collective during their summer residency at Canal Projects in New York. Over four months, Liana facilitated a series of workshops, public dialogues, and community gatherings focused on the exchange of knowledge between plants and humans. Grounded in the belief that plants are sentient beings, the residency expanded ways of relating to them beyond Western paradigms, highlighting their mystical, political, and aesthetic agency.
The residency unfolded in collaboration with artists, Indigenous knowledge keepers, and local community members who cook, heal, create, and think in deep relationship with plants. One of the main projects was Comedor de Quelites Mixtecos, created with the Indigenous women’s collective Voces from Guerrero, Mexico. Through interviews with five women—Mary José Prudente, Eufemia Neri, Zenaida Simón, Margarita Romualdo, and Paulina Mendoza—traditional recipes were documented that reveal ancestral forms of communication with plants. The result was a series of five recipe zines and a public dining event held in October 2023, where stories of migration, food, and healing were shared from a Mixtec perspective.
In parallel, Liana explored the poetics and politics of plant life with a particular focus on the coca leaf. In collaboration with Colombian artist Tatiana Arocha, three artworks were presented that addressed the symbolic and spiritual complexity of the plant. The public program included speculative research exercises on the future of coca, documentary screenings about coca-growing families in Colombia, and a drawing workshop using coca, corn, tobacco, and other vegetal materials.
Additionally, the collective organized Hable y vea coca, a short film screening event in collaboration with Colombia’s Futuro Coca Festival. Held in Spanish, the program sparked critical conversations around the stigmatization of coca in Colombia and the United States, while reclaiming the plant’s central role in Andean-Amazonian cosmologies through its culinary, medicinal, and ceremonial uses. Through poetic perspectives and testimonies from rural communities, the event invited audiences to imagine a different future for this sacred plant.
Las Yerbas Apothecary was conceived as a space to think alongside plants, create possibilities for healing, and reconfigure our relationships with botanical knowledge from a situated, critical, and transdisciplinary lens.
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