El Laberinto

25
Jan

El Laberinto

Laura Huertás Millán

Artist’s country of origen: Colombia – Francia
Materials: 16 mm, found footage, HD
Medium: video
Size: 21 min
Year: 2018

Line of Inquiry:

Coca-Politics Coca-Worlds

A voyage into the labyrinthine memories of Cristobal Gomez Abel, who worked for the drug lords in the Colombian Amazon during the 1980s. The film follows his journey through the forest and the ruins of a narco’s mansion, inspired by the Carrington mansion in the soap opera Dynasty, as it unravels the hallucinatory narrative of a near-death experience.

“The Labyrinth speaks to the syncretism of contemporary Colombia, where the disaster of narcocapitalism coexists with enduring precolonial relations to the world, creating an accord between the violence of the drug wars, the violence of European conquest, and possibilities of survival and resistance against both”
Erika Balsom

Awarded the Pardo di Domani Best Direction Prize, 2018
Locarno Film Festival

The Artist

Laura Huertas Millán

Laura Huertas Millán (b. 1983, Colombia) is an artist and filmmaker. She holds a PhD from Université PSL (SACRe-Programm) in Paris and conducted research at Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab as part of her studies.

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Para la Coca

09
Jan

Para la coca

Based on Jibina Marena Uay – Coca de la Buena Palabra, an ongoing script written by Cristobal Gomez Abel (Murui/Bora) and Laura Huertas Millan.

Artist’s country of origen: Colombia – Francia
Materials: 2-channel installation
Medium: video, installation
Size: 14 min
Year: 2024

Line of Inquiry:

Coca-Plant Coca-Worlds

Para la Coca is a film and audiovisual installation centered on the coca plant (Erythroxylum coca), co-authored with Cristóbal Gómez Abel, a member of the Bora and Murui Colombian First Nations, the work emerges from a dialogue sustained over more than ten years. Initiated by Gómez Abel, Para la Coca revisits a Murui myth of origin that functions as an ancestral law, offering ethical guidance on the proper use of the coca plant.

In this myth, coca is not an object or a resource, but a person and a deity, embodied in the figure of a young girl who teaches her father and community how to relate to the plant with responsibility, care, and reciprocity. The work challenges dominant colonial and Western frameworks that reduce coca to its extraction into cocaine, and instead affirms its cultural, spiritual, and medicinal significance within Indigenous worlds. Para la Coca advocates for the decriminalization of the plant by restoring its place within living systems of knowledge and practice.

The project was developed with the guidance of Nelly Kuiru, founder and director of the Escuela de Comunicación Indígena Amazonía Ka+ Jana Uai (La voz de nuestra imagen). Her role was central to the production and writing of the film. The work is shared with the permission of Gómez Abel and his community, acknowledging the responsibility involved in circulating the teachings of coca through the form of myth.

Creditos: Based on Jibina Marena Uay – Coca de la Buena Palabra, an ongoing script written by Cristobal Gomez Abel (Murui/Bora) and Laura Huertas Millan.

We acknowledge that the ancestral myth of origin of the coca plant belongs to the Murui nation. We thank them for allowing our interpretation with the purpose of de-stigmatizing the coca plant and psychotropics, as well as honoring and amplifying ancestral indigenous political, cultural and spiritual resistance in Colombia.

With
Cristobal Gomez Abel, Pedro Armando Sopin Morales, Harold Jeferson Gomez Florez, Gilber Olmedo Morales, Dewins Nicolas Gomez Florez, Didier Libardo Santana Gaspar, Carmen Sofia Gaspar Florez, Libardo Santana Florez, Diana Valentina Cuellar Gomez, Cristian Gomez Florez, Alina Santana Gaspar.

Recorded in
the Muiri Muina community,
Nimaira Náimeke ibike, Patio de Ciencia Dulce

Directed and produced by
Laura Huertas Millán

Creative and production consultant
Nelly Kuiru

DoP
Mauricio Reyes, Laura Huertas Millan

Sound recording
Laura Huertas Millan, Grégory Castéra, Angel Maria Fajardo

With the support of
PinchukArtCenter, Liverpool Biennial, CNAP (Centre National des arts plastiques), Institut Français (Résidence+), Mondes Nouveaux (Ministère de la culture).

More info visit: https://www.laurahuertasmillan.com/shows

The Artist

Laura Huertas Millán

Laura Huertas Millán (b. 1983, Colombia) is an artist and filmmaker. She holds a PhD from Université PSL (SACRe-Programm) in Paris and conducted research at Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab as part of her studies.

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If it’s Bayer, it’s good

06
Jan

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:

Coca-Politics

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.

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The Parakeet Won’t Knock Down the Dove

06
Jan

Foto: Mariana Reyes

Cortesía del artista

Foto: Mariana Reyes

The Parakeet Won’t Knock Down the Dove

Edinson Quiñones

Artist’s country of origen: Colombia
Materials: Impresión sobre satín
Size: 100 x 80 cm
Year: 2024

Line of Inquiry:

Coca-Worlds

The work The Parakeet Won’t Knock Down the Dove emerges as part of a project commissioned by the organization Más Arte Más Acción, which invited Colombian artists to rethink national symbols through the creation of a flag. Quiñones makes a statement through an image that invites reflection on the role of the coca plant in Colombia’s history of violence. Through the symbol of the dove, he suggests the importance of the coca plant in crop substitution policies and the transition to peace in conflict zones.

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.

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Artist Manifesto, Point 4 of the Peace Agreements

06
Jan

Photo: Alejandro Neira

Photo: Alejandro Neira

Photo: Mariana Reyes

Artist Manifesto, Point 4 of the Peace Agreements

Edinson Quiñones

Artist’s country of origen: Colombia
Materials: Mambe powder
Size: 100 x 70 cm
Year: 2024

Line of Inquiry:

Coca-Worlds

His work, Artist Manifesto, Point 4 of the Peace Agreements, presents a biography of the artist in which he speaks about how his personal experience has been central to his artistic production, written in the Nasa language as part of his lineage. Using mambe (coca powder mixed with Yarumo ash), Quiñones constructs an ephemeral narrative that highlights the oral nature of Indigenous language and underscores the need to rethink the use of the coca plant in the substitution of illicit crops and the transition to peace.

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.

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Heal

06
Jan

Heal

Andrés Domínguez

Artist’s country of origen: Colombia
Materials: Mambe on canvas
Size: 100 x 70 cm
Year: 2024

Line of Inquiry:

Coca-Worlds

This workd stems from Domínguez’s experience during the Popayork artist residency in Cauca, Colombia, where he witnessed the multiple inter-ethnic conflicts in the territory associated with tensions over the rights and use of ancestral lands. Domínguez creates this drawing through a ceremonial action in which he writes the word ‘sanar’ while blowing mambe over the canvas. The action of blowing comes from his experience with Amazonian elder healers who, when gathering to share their words and songs while consuming coca powder mixed with yarumo ash (mambe), release the powder through their mouths as they engage in dialogue.

The Artist

Andrés Domínguez

Andrés Fabián Domínguez Urrea is an artist born in Leticia, Amazonas, Colombia, in 1983. His practice experiments with media and materials of Amazonian origin, such as yanchama or mambe, as well as with ecologically oriented works that use organic and recycled materials.

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Amoka’s Hort

06
Jan

Amoka’s Hort

Tatiana Arocha

Artist’s country of origen: Colombia – United States
Materials: Acrylic on canvas, gold
Size: 822 x 274 cm
Year: 2019

Line of Inquiry:

Coca-Politics Coca-Worlds

In conversation with Gory Nejedeka Jifichiu, a Muinane elder, Arocha deepened her understanding of the sacred plants, gardens, and ancestral knowledge of the Murui-Muinane people. During a visit to his maloca in the Colombian Amazon in July 2019, made possible through the Sustainable Arts Foundation fellowship for artist-parents, Arocha and her son Joaquín were warmly received by Gory and his family.

These conversations are documented in Arocha’s catalogs, recording Gory’s teachings about the jungle and mambe, a preparation primarily made from coca leaves and yarumo ashes, consumed with tobacco paste, called ambil. The experience expanded Arocha’s perception of the forest and the ancestral knowledge that sustains the land, maintaining its connectivity, diversity, and vitality.

In her large-scale work Amoka’s Garden, Arocha reconstructs the landscape of the Amazonian gardens of the reserve where she exchanged knowledge with Gory Nejedeka during her research travels in the Amazon.

The Artist

Tatiana Arocha

Tatiana Arocha is a Colombian artist born in New York in 1974, whose practice explores the intimacy between people and the land, personal memory, and her own experience as an immigrant.

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Kanasto de Origen

05
Jan

Kanasto de Origen

Aimena Úai

Artist’s country of origen: Colombia
Materials: Mixed media: dragon’s blood resin, mambe, and wito on canvas
Size: 80 × 90 cm (31.5 × 35.4 in)
Year: 2024

Line of Inquiry:

Coca-Worlds

The Maloka and everything learned within it form a constellation of great interconnected knowledges. In this context, the kanasto embodies the image and practice of weaving the Murui word-thought: a living archive opened to teach, heal, deliberate, and envision the future—anchored in the mambeadero, the house, and the plants of power.

The Artist

Aimena Úai

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.

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Seeking the Origin

05
Jan

Seeking the Origin

Aimena Úai

Artist’s country of origen: Colombia
Materials: Mambe, wito, and oil on canvas
Size: 90 x 150 cm
Year: 2024

Line of Inquiry:

Coca-Politics Coca-Worlds

In Seeking the Origin, Aimema Úai evokes the memory of his grandparents and the path that connects his territory to ancestral knowledge. The work is part of the Caminos (íio) series, in which painting becomes a gesture of spiritual search and return to his Murui-Muina roots. From his place of origin —La Chorrera, between the Putumayo and Caquetá rivers— the Murui-Muina and other Amazonian peoples have resisted in order to preserve the jíbina or koka, the sacred plant that helps care for the world and maintain its natural balance. However, with the arrival of Catholic evangelizers after the rubber genocide, the demonization of the plant began. Decades later, during the cocaine boom, its spiritual meaning was again distorted. Despite these ruptures, within the mambeadero —a space for word, listening, and teaching— ancestral knowledge about the proper use of the plant has been preserved. Today, mambe, the fine powder resulting from mixing toasted and ground coca leaves with the ashes of yarumo —a plant and tree considered sacred by Amazonian peoples—, reaffirms itself as a symbol of strength and cultural continuity: word of life. Mambe sustains spiritual communication, collective thought, and the daily practice of the principles that guide life.

The Artist

Aimena Úai

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.

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The House Where Words Are Chewed

05
Jan

The House Where Words Are Chewed

Aimena Úai

Artist’s country of origen: Colombia
Size: 165 x 230 cm
Year: 2025

Line of Inquiry:

Coca-Worlds

In Moo Buinaima Jofo, Aimema Úai depicts the communal space where mambe, ambil, and word are shared. The work translates a spiritual architecture—the maloka—into pictorial form, merging oil paint with coca leaves and other natural materials. These elements not only reference ritual practices but also embody the physical presence of plants as carriers of knowledge and memory. Through painting, Úai examines how relationships between body, territory, and thought materialize in living matter, positioning coca as a symbol of dialogue and cultural continuity.

The Artist

Aimena Úai

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.

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