Aimema Úai —The Voice of the Crane— is a contemporary artist, mambeólogo (coca practitioner), and researcher from the Murui-Muina people of the Colombian Amazon. Born in La Chorrera in 1996, his artistic formation is deeply rooted in the ancestral knowledge of his family. The forest was his first school: a territory without internet connection, where he engaged with the world through traditional medicine, songs, dances, and the care of the chagra, the sacred garden his mother taught him to cultivate. There, he planted his first tobacco and coca plants, which later became the guiding forces of his spiritual and creative path.

His work emerges from an intimate relationship with sacred plants and their preparations —such as mambe and ambil— medicines through which he connects with his ancestors and the secrets of the forest. In the maloka, the communal house where word and medicine are shared, his family introduced him to the spirits, granting him access to deep knowledge about nature and its healing power. The maloka, both a physical and symbolic space, remains central to his life and art: within it, the coca leaf becomes a tool for healing, a guide for collective decision-making, and a vessel for the memory of his people.

While painting, Aimema engages in the practice of mambear —chewing the sacred coca preparation— as a way to communicate with the plant, quiet the mind, and open thought. His compositions, created with vegetal pigments extracted from seeds, resins, and minerals, evoke the symbolic architecture of the territory, the woven patterns of the kanasto, and the cosmological designs that link body and landscape. The grandson of elders who survived the Indigenous genocide of the rubber boom, his paintings act as visual ceremonies of memory and healing —restoring the dignity of plants, spirits, and the peoples who care for them.

Grounded in the territory of the Murui-Muina people and the wisdom of plants, his practice moves fluidly between art, spirituality, and ecology, inviting new ways of seeing and being in relation with the living world.

Aimema Úai’s work has been featured in international exhibitions such as El Sol y la Luna (Instituto de Visión, New York, 2021), El Alma y la Memoria (Instituto de Visión, New York, 2023), the collective exhibition COCAWORLDS at the United Nations Headquarters (New York, 2024) and its subsequent presentation at Open Society Foundations (New York, 2024–2025), as well as the Bienal das Amazônias (Belém do Pará, 2025).