En principio me forme para ser dibujante y pintor, esta práctica se ha afirmado con los años, a través del trabajo y la investigación. El recurso de la pintura en el relato de la historia y la pintura como documento han sido recursos presentes en mis exhibiciones.
In this work, coca plants are placed in front of a fairy tale cottage called “Davivienda,” the name of a leading savings and home loan corporation in Colombia. Through the windows of the “house,” two monitors transmit images of everyday life in Colombia, about the street and roads of Colombia, about family, dreams, ambitions, and so forth.
A series of photographs taken in Cali, Colombia, between 2003 and 2008 that document gardens in which coca plants are used as hedges to separate residential spaces. Planting coca for decorative purposes was a common practice in Cali in the 1980s.
To make visible the issue of “mules,” (people paid to carry drugs, often inside their bodies), the artist swallowed coca seeds before taking a flight from Cali, Colombia, to Curaçao, where he defecated these seeds, planted them, and cared for the plants for the duration of the workshop.
Cuentan que los dibujantes de las expediciones botánicas al Nuevo Mundo, al ver agotados sus pigmentos para dibujar, los sustituían por pigmentos vegetales o minerales encontrados en la región.
A planting of coca beginning to flower based on the fame and history of English gardens.
Five live coca plants with three infections are brought to be exhibited. From the United States, these were diagnosed with the help of Amy Franceschini from the Future Farmers collective, as a metaphor of the relations between Colombia and the United States in the so-called “war on drugs.”
Exhibition of a kind of “bank of coca seeds,” with seeds collected from public and private gardens in the town of Cali and its environs. At the opening, coca seeds are given to the public to encourage dialogue and conversation about the war on coca and the threat to biodiversity in Colombia. The nearly one thousand seeds installed on the wall were gradually taken by the public during the period of the exhibition.
Poet, historian, and curator Renny Pritikin wrote a poem that serves as a manifesto of principles for the exhibition:
Seeds are time capsules, veritable libraries on the history of beans, corns, papaya, lulo, mora, granadillas, curuba, pepino dulce, tomate, papayuela, maracuyá, guanábana, mamoncillo, guama, aguacate, chirimoya, borojo, mamey, caimo, feijoa, guavas, pitahaya, and…coca. We can have seed libraries and plantings in the urban milieu, and a return to the notion of farmer as of a place, deeply committed to a knowledge of the soil, weather, water and local needs. I dream of a blurring of the distinctions among agriculture, activism and art… a movement so integrated into its field that it is invisible, a refreshing breeze…