Para la Coca

Para la Coca is an audiovisual installation around the coca plant (Erythroxylum coca), a plant stigmatized and criminalized since the colonization of the Americas. This work is co-authored with Cristobal Gomez Abel, who is part of the Bora and Murui Colombian First Nations, and is the result of a conversation between the two authors for the past ten years. At the initiative of Cristobal, this work revisits a Murui myth of origin, which equals an ancestral law that teaches us about the ethics that the coca plant use implies. In this myth, the plant is a person, a deity embodying the form of a girl who teaches her father and community the “right use” of the plant. This work shares this message to advocate for the decriminalisation of the plant.

This work has been accompanied by Nelly Kuiru, the founder and director of the Amazonia school Escuela de Comunicación Indígena Amazonía Ka+ Jana Uai (La voz de nuestra imagen). We acknowledge her influencial role in the production and writing of this film and acknowledge as well the permission granted by Cristobal Gomez Abel and his community to spread the teachings of the coca through the form of this myth.