Ofrenda

Logo del proyecto OFRENDA

Coca leaves and tobacco placed inside the hat of a Nasa traditional healer, prior to the beginning of a path-opening ritual in Tierradentro, 2018.

The exhibition comprises a selection of 16 black-and-white photographs. The series unfolds in two movements: (1) An exercise in photographic experimentation—both analog and digital—built through layered compositions that overlap and converge to construct a narrative around everyday practices of survival and continuity. These layers weave together spirituality and ritual practice, connections to ancestry, daily subsistence, and the defense of life and Nasa territory. (2) Photographs produced through the accompaniment of Nasa ceremonial practices, revealing other forms of community re-existence and ways of relating to nature in a world marked by deterioration. Across both bodies of work, the coca leaf operates as a channel for thinking from perspectives that blur boundaries and categories, breaking with linear ways of seeing.

Sandra Liliana Peña, a Nasa Indigenous authority who openly opposed drug trafficking and the cultivation of illicit coca crops in Indigenous territories, was assassinated on April 20, 2021. Her death brought together a large gathering of people from different regions of Cauca who, honoring her request before being laid to rest, carried out a minga to continue confronting the territorial disruptions and violence produced by these crops. As part of this collective action, coca plants cultivated for drug trafficking were uprooted. That day, more than 30 people were injured.

The exhibition presents a selection of 24 color photographs that, taken together, reveal an increasingly threatened world—marked by ecological fragility, biodiversity loss, large-scale extractivism, an agro-industrial model without horizon, ethical and political crises, and violence against those who resist this way of understanding and inhabiting the world.

On August 10, 2019, Kevin Mestizo and Eugenio Tenorio were killed by FARC dissidents on the road between El Palo and Toribío (Cauca, Colombia), while traveling on a chiva transporting members of the Indigenous Guard, who were carrying out territorial control to block drug trafficking routes through Indigenous lands. The photograph documents a symbolic action convened on October 12 of that same year in protest against the threats facing the Indigenous Guard. The following day, Indigenous Guard member Toribio Canas was killed, and two weeks later, traditional authority Cristina Bautista, along with four other Indigenous Guards, was assassinated.

180 portraits of Indigenous Guards—Kiwe Thegnas—from southwestern Colombia, produced as instant Polaroid photographs between 2021 and 2023. Each portrait exists in two copies: one given to the photographed person, and another that forms part of this work, installed over the red and green colors of the flag of the Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca (CRIC)—blood and land—as a gesture of recognition and tribute to the Indigenous Guard.

OFRENDA has taken material form in two artist books, conceived as encounters with the territory through their very making. The exploration and use of organic elements from the land—such as coca leaves, tobacco, hemp, cabuya, and other natural fibers—are integrated into the pages and covers, giving body and life to the territory as it is read and felt.

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