In December 2010, Nasa Indigenous leader Fabiola Piñacué forced the Colombian government to withdraw a nationwide media campaign that promoted stigmatizing narratives about the coca plant. For more than two years, the campaign had portrayed coca as a demonic force, framing it as the cause of rural violence and drug trafficking, and marking a generation with the phrase: “Don’t cultivate the plant that kills.”

Piñacué’s legal action began at home, when her daughter repeated that phrase while she prepared coca cookies—one of the coca-based foods that her company, Coca Nasa, helped popularize in Colombia as part of a broader effort to reclaim the leaf’s nutritional and cultural uses. Founded by Piñacué in 1998, Coca Nasa became the first company in Colombia authorized to commercialize food products made from coca leaf as a way of challenging the stigma surrounding the plant. Years later, the company would also confront The Coca-Cola Company in a high-profile dispute after the multinational attempted to stop the Indigenous company from using the word “coca” in the name of its coca-leaf soda.

Confronted once again with the criminalization of a plant with numerous traditional uses, Piñacué took the case to court, demanding that the state stop persecuting the cultivation and use of a plant sacred to her and her community. For more than 8,000 years, Indigenous peoples throughout the Andes and Amazon have sustained coca as food, medicine, a mode of thought, and a technology of collective life.

This persecution is not recent. From colonial eradication campaigns to the 1961 United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs—which wrongly classified the coca leaf alongside substances such as heroin, fentanyl, and cocaine—state and international policies have systematically erased the distinction between the plant and its processed derivative. The expansion of the War on Drugs further intensified this reduction, collapsing coca into its association with the narcotic.

It is within this tension that COCAWORLDS emerged, the curatorial and research platform I developed alongside designer Giselly Mejía and artist Juan Pablo Caicedo. The project brings together a living archive of artists who engage the plant through multiple situated relationships, from Indigenous cosmologies and ancestral knowledge systems to experiences shaped by rural life, migration, urban memory, political violence, and ongoing struggles over land, identity, and representation. The project seeks to reclaim coca’s sacred, political, and nutritional value.

Our research asks what happens when creative processes unfold in dialogue with the coca plant and Indigenous knowledge-keepers, and what forms of thought, image, and sensibility emerge from those encounters.

The project has allowed us to identify a range of collaborations between elders, healers, educators, and artists that explore new languages through which coca expresses its political, nutritional, and spiritual power. Thinkers such as Luis Yonda (Nasa), from Cauca; and Cristóbal Gómez Abel (Murui-Muina/Bora) and Gory Nejedeka–Siika Marim+ (Muinane), from the Colombian Amazon; work through performance, installation, film, and collective pedagogy to reveal the many ways coca continues to speak despite state suppression.

Coca as a Technology for Expanding Consciousness

Among those opening new pathways for the coca plant to speak beyond criminalization is the long-term collaboration between nomasmetaforas, the collective formed by Clara Melniczuk and Julián Dupont, and Nasa traditional healer and spiritual authority Yonda.

Through ceremony, performance, pedagogy, and collective dreaming, their exchanges cultivate spaces where coca emerges as a living source of knowledge, relation, and imagination.

Rooted in contemporary art and Indigenous thought, nomasmetaforas develops practices that unsettle anthropocentrism and the colonial structures that organize knowledge production. In collaboration with Indigenous authorities and knowledge-keepers, the collective activates what they call “vegetal conversations,” approaching Indigenous knowledge as a pathway toward decolonial emancipation and a way of thinking with plants, territory, and the spiritual world.

Yonda is a Nasa traditional healer and educator whose work is part of a broader effort to recover and sustain ceremonial practices disrupted by centuries of colonization. “We have reawakened ancestral knowledge among the Nasa people; in less than 30 years, we have reactivated our ceremonies,” he explains.

Over decades, the Nasa have strengthened collective struggles for territorial defense, Indigenous education, autonomy, and traditional medicine. Within this trajectory, Yonda has become one of the elders dedicated to carrying these knowledges forward. Through ceremonies guided by coca, tobacco, and other plants of power, his work seeks to restore balance between people, land, and the spiritual forces that sustain life.

For the Nasa, coca is central to medicine, spirituality, and collective identity. With a population of more than 240,000 people, they are one of the largest Indigenous nations in Colombia, widely recognized for their long history of organizing in defense of territorial sovereignty and autonomy through processes led by institutions such as the Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca (CRIC) and the Indigenous Intercultural Autonomous University (UAIIN-CRIC), Colombia’s first Indigenous university.

Yonda understands coca as a spiritual and medicinal technology capable of expanding consciousness. “Whoever approaches the plant with respect, chews it with concentration, can travel through the universe and understand the purpose of life. It elevates vital energy and opens access to unrestricted knowledge.”

Through installations, performative lectures, and pedagogical experiments, these exchanges create spaces where coca becomes an active collaborator in decolonial thinking. Here, coca’s spirit participates in what nomasmetaforas calls “pedagogies of radical imagination,” where dreaming becomes a way of knowing.

This approach takes form in projects such as Technologies of Collective Dreaming (2021–ongoing), a performative research process in which nomasmetaforas explores dreaming as a shared technology of knowledge. During the sessions, participants lie down wearing masks filled with coca and andakí leaves (Brugmansia), another sacred medicinal plant, while Indigenous healers and knowledge-keepers guide collective spaces of listening, dreaming, and imagination. Breathing through these plants sharpens attention and opens access to dream imagery as part of a process through which new forms of thought emerge.

“My work is to accompany and help open medicinal pathways that allow us to heal. Coca allows us to experience expanded states of consciousness and invites us to build a better relationship with Mother Earth. I ask permission from the plants so they can guide each of these encounters,” says Yonda from his home in Mercedes, Cauca.

Dream workshops operate as sites of experimentation that challenge dominant ideas about who gets to produce knowledge, and how. Moving between ritual, performance, and vegetal knowledges, they open other ways of thinking, sensing, and being in relation.

More recently, nomasmetaforas and Yonda participated in KAUKA: Assembly of Possible Worlds (2025), part of the 47th National Artists’ Salon. Founded in 1940, the Salon is Colombia’s most important and historic public art platform, traditionally structured around large-scale national exhibitions. Developed alongside Indigenous, Afro-descendant, peasant, and community-led processes, KAUKA marked a significant shift in the institution’s recent history by transforming the Salon into an assembly grounded in territory, listening, and collective practice. More than an exhibition, it redefined how art, knowledge, spirituality, and politics can be brought into relation in Colombia.

Collective Languages

More than 600 kilometers south, near Leticia in the Colombian Amazon, Murui-Muina/Bora educator and community leader Cristóbal Gómez also asks permission from the coca plant before beginning any process of documentation alongside artist and filmmaker Laura Huertas Millán.

“It is the plant that allows this work to happen,” Gómez says. “The first thing I do is ask coca to guide the process.”

In Para la coca (2023), Gómez’s youngest son, Harold, slowly toasts coca leaves that will later become mambe—the sacred green powder made from coca leaves and yarumo ashes, shared during palabra dulce rituals: nightly collective conversations held among the men of the Nimaira Naimeki Ibiki village (Patio de ciencia dulce, or “sweet science patio”). 

Gómez often leads these gatherings inside the mambeadero, the ceremonial space where mambe is prepared, taken into the mouth, shared, and discussed. In the film, the gradual transformation of leaves into powder over the fire becomes an everyday gesture through which an entire cosmology unfolds.

The artwork revisits a Murui-Muina origin story in which coca appears as a sacred feminine being who teaches her father and community how to cultivate and care for the plant: “This coca I brought you is the true coca, for speaking, advising, working, thinking, organizing, and educating people. We must take care of it. Do not mistreat it,” the voice in the video says.

Within this space, mambe sustains a shared mode of thinking. Thought no longer belongs to an individual but becomes collective. Coca sweetens the word, while ambil (a concentrated tobacco extract) cools the mind, enabling difficult conversations, reflection, and the transmission of ancestral knowledge and memory.

Huertas Millán first arrived in the Amazon through a long-term critique of ethnography and its entanglements with colonialism, a central concern of her PhD research. Her conversations with Gómez initially emerged from a desire to question and denaturalize the culture of the war on drugs, beginning with the traces these economies had inscribed in the territory. Gómez’s memories of the arrival of cocaine in the Amazon deepened their collaboration, opening space to foreground the ancestral meanings of coca against the stereotypes imposed by the drug trade.

As their collaboration took shape, they came to understand Huertas Millán’s project as one of many that amplify a centuries-long Indigenous struggle: to de-stigmatize the plant and bring international audiences—particularly in Europe and North America—closer to what coca truly is beyond the narratives of the war on drugs.

Huertas Millán was transformed by Gómez’s relationship with coca, which she describes as “symbiotic, deeply metabolized.” Through this intimacy, coca finds a body from which to speak. Huertas explains that listening to the plant’s guardians invites difficult but necessary reflections on how deeply coloniality is internalized, and on the importance of collective work to confront it.

Coca also emerges as a space for collective reflection in Gory Nejedeka-Siika Marim+’s collaborations with visual artist Tatiana Arocha. Like Gómez, Marim+ belongs to the Peoples of the Center—Indigenous nations of the Colombian Amazon who refer to themselves as the “People of Tobacco, Coca, and Sweet Cassava,” for whom mambe organizes spiritual, political, and communal life.

Marim+ is a descendant of those who survived the rubber boom, a period of violent extraction in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that led to the enslavement, displacement, and mass killing of Indigenous peoples in the Amazon. One of the few remaining speakers of the Muinane language, the Indigenous teacher leads community education spaces centered on the transmission of songs, dances, and knowledge about planting chagras, fishing, and sustaining life in the forest. At a time when the Muinane people face the risk of cultural disappearance after decades of displacement and violence, these pedagogical spaces also become forms of resistance.

In 2019, Arocha traveled from New York, where she has lived for nearly two decades, to visit Marim+’s baoja (house of thought) in the Colombian Amazon, seeking to better understand the traditional uses of a plant long distorted by U.S. prohibitionist narratives. Inside the baoja, Marim+ shared teachings on mambe and the relationships his people maintain with coca, tobacco, and sweet cassava.

“Coca is finding new minds, new ways of expressing herself,” Marim+ says. For him, mambe is a technology of thought. To mambear means to sit, reflect, listen, and discover what already exists within oneself. The plant does not provide universal answers; it reveals different things to different people.

This understanding informed Tea Room, part of Arocha’s critical installation Impending Beauty (2017). Drawing on the aesthetics and materiality of nineteenth-century European tea salons—spaces historically reserved for the intellectual exchange of colonial elites—the project reclaims and unsettles this format, inviting people outside these circles to gather around coca infusions while questioning who is authorized to speak, to think, and to make decisions about how life is organized. In doing so, it opens space for collective reflection on environmental destruction, violence, and the enduring consequences of the War on Drugs.

Following her encounter with Marim+, the installation took on another dimension. Arocha began to pay attention to how the plant, in infusion, becomes active and intervenes in the dialogue—not only as a subject of discussion, but as a participant. “When people began drinking coca tea, I noticed how conversations started to flow in a very particular way,” she recalls. “It was beautiful to see dialogue weaving itself together, as if the plant were operating within the gathering, fulfilling its role of sharing and exchanging knowledge.”

In his exchanges with Arocha, Marim+ saw the plant finding other mediums through which to express itself. In 2024, during a workshop in Bogotá, the artist invited him to create frottage drawings by rubbing coca leaves against paper, transferring their veins and textures onto the surface.

“I had never seen it like that before,” Marim+ recalls. “It was speaking with a different voice than mambe. The traces left by the leaves on the paper made me curious, and I could sense the plant speaking in another language, leaving her trace on the paper.”

His words echo those of Yonda and Gómez, who describe coca as a living presence that continues to generate thought, memory, and relation. What these dialogues are also opening are new spaces of conversation in territories where coca has long been misrepresented or criminalized. The works have traveled to Seoul, Paris, Copenhagen, Brussels, Sharjah, and New York—including the United Nations—reaching audiences who are encountering the plant, perhaps for the first time, beyond the narratives of the war on drugs. In this sense, the work is not only about coca. It is coca finding new minds, new ways of expressing herself—a possibility that Gómez, speaking from his home near Leticia, had already anticipated.

“It is not me people are listening to. When we enter into contact with the sacred coca plant, it is the plant speaking through us.”