Juan Pablo Caicedo Torres
2023 HEAR US Awardee
Art & Public Policy Class of 2023
Juan Pablo Caicedo Torres is a transdisciplinary artist, educator, and researcher whose practice considers a wide range of sociopolitical issues through collaboration and activism. His work crosses various mediums, including visual and performance art, installation, socially engaged art, and public space interventions.
Project
"Coca, the Powers of a Sacred Plant"
For ages, the coca plant has been central to Indigenous People's cosmology. It has served as food and medicine in the Andes and the Amazon, providing the necessary nutrients and vitamins for strength and concentration during long hours of work, conversations, and ceremonies. The prohibition of the coca plant dates back to the Spanish colonization of South America, when it was first considered as an "evil plant", and it remains forbidden by the 1961 United Nations convention on drugs and narcotics because it is used as the base ingredient to produce cocaine.
Coca: the powers of a sacred plant is an interdisciplinary and collaborative creative research project aiming to reframe the coca plant as a sacred, medicinal and nutritional plant central to the life and culture of Amazonian and Andean indigenous peoples, instead of a stigmatized plant used to produce cocaine. This project will be a platform to present multiple voices from artists, activists, indigenous leaders, researchers, and policymakers into an open dialogue aiming to rethink the use of the coca plant. The expected outcome is an exhibition and educational public program joining artists and researchers on the coca plant and its uses, stories, symbolism, traditional classification, nutritional value and spiritual aspects.
This project will invite the public to acknowledge the coca plant as an instrument for well-being, spiritual connection, food sovereignty, ecological sustainability, health and peacemaking. This process seeks to actively imagine how the relationship with the coca plant can be reframed from prohibition to an opportunity for thinking of the relevance of indigenous knowledge to transform the present. The central purpose is the de-stigmatization of plants, through the telling of different stories about the coca plant, and thinking of plants as tools for both indigenous and non-indigenous people to promote social justice and transformation.
"Coca, the Powers of a Sacred Plant " is a project in collaboration with the Colombian Studies Group and other artists and indigenous leaders.
