A project by the Peruvian artist Ximena Garrido-Lecca about the different gazes and discussions around the coca leaf, with the objective to reconsider it as a multidimensional and historical actor.
This book continues the debates derived from Botanical Readings: Erythroxylum Coca, an installation by the Peruvian artist Ximena Garrido-Lecca exhibited at proyectoamil, Lima, in 2019. This piece seeks to reconsider the coca leaf as a multidimensional and historical actor. This publication goes back to the exhibition, revising this mille art plant as an agent capable of articulating transversal reflections on the relationship between tradition and modernity, nature and science, vernacular and Western medicine, as well as between local policies of cultivation and consumption, and the market control regimes imposed by the nation-states.
Born 1980 in Lima (Peru), Ximena Garrido-Lecca lives and works between Lima, London and Mexico City.