Tatiana Arocha: Entre la Coca y el Oro

As contemporary hipster society in America embraces a variety of specific crops that offer everything from spiritual cleansing, like sage, to total mental refurbishment, like psilocybin, Arocha is here to remind us about a previous maligned, misused, and ever-popular cash crop, the coca plant, and its painful and convoluted story.   She offers a strategy for possibly pulling ourselves out of this rut of obsession, overuse, and maybe misappropriation (although who’s to say that what one culture does with a certain plant is right while what another does is wrong?).  The galleries of The Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, at historic Snug Harbor are perfectly suited for this kind of site-specific installation focusing on an idea, and Arocha’s exhibition flows neatly from a central forest of ersatz coca plants (because it is illegal in this country to possess the plant in its original form) titled Sueño con Jardines de Coca (2025) to a darkened screening room, then to an ironical installation, and finally on to a workshop for visitors.  Each of these chapters in Arocha’s story, as it were, seek to make the viewer aware of what the plant itself is capable of beyond its mere narcotic properties, and gently guide the contemporary, iphone-addicted museumgoer, into a mental space more receptive to a direct interaction with plants and their properties.

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Sabio Yarumo, Dulce Coca, Tabaco Frio Y Yuca Brava (2025) is a 4 minute long black and white video created by Arocha with footage filmed during her stay with the Bora Muinane community in Colombia.  In the video, the indigenous and sacred substance mambe is created, which is used in religious rituals.  The bleak monochromatic palette, the murmur of voices and the vigorous stirring of a pot overlays a still image of the thick tangled Amazonian rainforest.  That this mystical Mambe substance is eked out of this forbidding ecosystem is an illustration of the strange connections of people with their surroundings.  Meanwhile, in the next gallery, a “proper” tea takes place amongst a neat assemblage of gilt rococo settees and armchairs, in Impending Beauty (2017).  In a Robert Gober-style gesture of subtly substituting inoffensive decorative patterns for poignant ones, Arocha has upholstered her genteel furnishings and imprinted her chinaware with a floral pattern interwoven with semiautomatic guns.  Behind the salon arrangement is a mural depicting an Amazonian scene similar to her video:  there are multiple approaches to nature, accommodation (mambe) or resistance (industrialization). 

 

Arocha’s exploration of the coca plant comes to rest in the final gallery which houses a workspace entitled Weaving Ourselves into the Land, a joint project with Eliana Hernández Pachón, Jimena Vega, and the collective Ginger Blonde.  Besides the larger installations, videos, and sculptures, Entre la Coca y el Oro is filled with small biological samples, framed drawings and prints based on vegetal examples.  In Weaving Ourselves into the Land the visitor is invited to join the collective around understanding, and perhaps worship of plants.  A desk is set up to allow the visitor to create rubbings of leaves and branches of a variety of specimens, which simply and efficiently familiarizes the individual doing the rubbing with the shape and thickness of the leaves as well as its vein structure and the pattern of placement of the leaves on the branch. Entre la Coca y el Oro functions both as an exhibition and an experience which successfully re-situates Coca from cola and cocaine, to Mambe and the Muinane.