The article “I Speak for the Forest, for the Rivers, for the Ancestors Who Keep Conversing Through the Mambe”explores the work of Murui-Muina artist and mambeólogo Aimema Úai, for whom painting is not an aesthetic representation but a living practice of thinking with the forest.

Aimema Úai and Angélica Cuevas during the interview at the artist’s home in Bogotá, October 2024. Photo: Óscar Pérez for Forging Journal | Forge Project (NYC)

This text was the first article I wrote after being selected as part of the 2025–2026 cohort of Journal Forging, the writing and editorial fellowship of Forge Project in New York (USA). Journal Forging accompanies writers, curators, and thinkers in the development of critical and experimental texts in dialogue with contemporary artistic practices, with a strong emphasis on Indigenous, decolonial, and situated perspectives. The program understands writing as a relational practice: an exercise in listening, research, and sustained conversation with artists, territories, and living memories, rather than a distant or extractive form of analysis.

Raokaid+Ka+ / Caring for the Territory, 2025.

The article emerges from an in-depth interview I conducted with Aimema Úai in October 2025, at his home-studio in Bogotá, just days before his trip to Belém do Pará to participate in the Amazon Biennial and in parallel spaces to COP30. From that conversation, the text explores how his pictorial practice—activated by mambe, by the spoken word, and by pigments drawn from the territory such as wito and dragon’s blood resin—functions as an extension of the maloka, the ceremonial house, school, and spiritual center of the Murui-Muina people.

Aimema’s paintings operate as living cartographies of Murui-Muina continuity, where the maloka does not appear as a ruin or a metaphor, but as an active structure from which balance between body, territory, and spirit is continually rebuilt, even after the devastation caused by the rubber boom and the extractive violences that have deeply marked the Amazon. In his work, painting becomes a way of mambear: a space where the word is activated, where the world is cared for, and where different times and territories are allowed to speak to one another.

Aimema Úai at his home in Bogotá.

From COCAWORLDS, this text speaks directly to our lines of inquiry Coca–The Plant and Coca–Word, World, affirming coca as a relational being, a living medicine, and a technology of knowledge—challenging regimes of stigmatization that have reduced the plant to a commodity or a problem of control. Aimema’s work reminds us that art can also be a practice of reexistence: a way of keeping the house standing, of keeping the word moist and alive, and of continuing to listen to the forest even where we are no longer physically present.

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What would happen if we thought about the future of the coca leaf beyond prohibition, stigma, and inherited narratives?

Mama Coca Chronicles: Navigating Ancestral Heritage and Future Narratives, an academic article published in the Journal for Future Studies (Researched and written by me), begins with this question to explore how coca can open pathways toward more just, reparative, and decolonial Latin American futures.

The paper is structured as a journey across academic research, participatory practice, and speculative thinking. Rather than limiting itself to analyzing the plant’s past or present, it proposes something different: the use of futures methodologies to imagine possible, probable, and desirable scenarios, integrating ancestral knowledge, migrant voices, art, politics, and futures design.

How did I research and what did I find?

The research combines traditional qualitative methods with futuring ones.

Desk Research: I conducted extensive literature reviews to understand how coca moved from being a sacred plant before the colonization of Abya Yala (the American continent) to a source of war, injustice, and political turmoil. At some point in my research, I wanted to map out that journey and created a timeline for the visual readers (see below).

Signal scanning: I started scanning signals of change and categorizing them into Social, Technological, Economic, Environmental, and Political (STEEP model), which uncovered that the majority of the changes proposed today around coca are Economic related (use of coca as an ingredient for recipes, and natural products, prices of coca production lowering and crops increasing, etc) while the Technological ones are very few (Medical research on coca’s in cardiovascular and pulmonary conditions, as well as attention-deficit disorders)

Workshops: I also had the fortune to facilitate participatory workshops with Andean and Amazonian artists, researchers, and traditional users of the coca leaf, using COCAWORLDS exhibitions in New York as a holding space for these. These participants (often absent from public policy debates) articulated a future for coca that centers education, reparations, and scientific research, framing the plant not merely as a botanical entity but as a living symbol of unfinished education, unresolved colonial harm, Indigenous governance, and alternative relationships to land and knowledge.

Alejandro Jaramillo

Alejandro Jaramillo

Alejandro Jaramillo

Alejandro Jaramillo

Alejandro Jaramillo

Alejandro Jaramillo

Three scenarios to think through (and decide)

The paper concludes with three speculative scenarios for the future of coca that serve as a narrative tool to provoke reflection, debate, and ethical positioning (Spoiler alert: some could make you feel uncomfortable, but that is the intention). 

• The Coca Alkaloids’ Medical Journey (A counterfactual scenario): Here I go back to 1884 and send Freud to do research on the coca plant with Indigenous peoples in South America instead of experimenting on himself with the recently isolated cocaine alkaloid (which he actually did). I play with the idea that coca could have developed as a medicine since the nineteenth century through an early integration of Western science and Indigenous knowledge.
• How Cocaine-Infused Products Captivated the World (A probable future): This scenario brings together things we have already seen happen with other previously illegal plants (i.e Coffee and Cannabis) that suddenly get legalized and absorbed by corporate and colonial logics, turning coca products into those that serve consumerism and continue making the rich richer.
• A Story of Healing and Reconciliation (A preferable future): Preferable for whom? For those who participated in the COCAWORLDS exhibitions and my workshops, and for others dreaming of a future where legalization and regulation go hand in hand with Indigenous governance, public education, reparations, and healing—for people, territories, and the plant.

An open invitation

What futures are we helping to cultivate today?

Mama Coca Chronicles is not only a paper about coca. It is an invitation to reflect on how we imagine the future, who participates in that imagination, and which stories we choose to amplify. 

I invite you to read the full article.
Gracias for reading!

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