Coca Orbits - Laura Huertas Millán
In the Western imagination, the coca plant is largely reduced to cocaine: a drug first industrialised in Europe and entangled with a violent system of extraction, prohibition, and control. But long before this history, coca held healing, ritual, and social significance for Indigenous communities in the Andes, knowledge persistently marginalised by colonial and scientific hegemony.
Since 2018, Colombian artist and filmmaker Laura Huertas Millán has engaged with this layered history. In Curanderxs—presented in the exhibition Becoming Ancestors at argos—she imagined a speculative 17th-century world where femmes clandestinely distribute coca leaves to enslaved Indigenous workers under colonial rule. With this new lecture performance, Huertas Millán creates a hybrid form between live cinema, documentary and science fiction: coca appears as a travelling character, moving from the Andes into global systems of knowledge, control, and desire.
The legal status of the coca leaf is once again under debate at the United Nations, and the so-called “war on drugs” obscures deeper geopolitical and economic interests. But Coca Orbits insists that, more than an object of prohibition, coca is a lens through which we can ask the question—who produces knowledge?
Practical information
Tickets: this event is sold out. Click here to register for the waiting list
Languages: Spanish, Quechua, English, French
Duration: 1h20
Accessibility: Please confirm your attendance with a wheelchair during online reservation or through box office | no accessible toilets
Presentation: Kunstenfestivaldesarts, argos centre for audiovisual arts
A project by and with Laura Huertas Millán
Coproduction: Kunstenfestivaldesarts, argos centre for audiovisual arts, transmediale
Kunstenfestivaldesarts is an international performing arts festival dedicated to contemporary theatre, dance, performance and visual arts. Every year, it takes place in Brussels during three weeks in May, in some thirty cultural venues and public spaces in Brussels. Contemporary: it supports both established and up-and-coming artists with the creation of bold artistic work rooted in today’s world. International: artists from all over the world are invited to confront us with diverse artistic practices and perspectives. Of Brussels: it aims to reflect the diversity of Brussels and encourage mobility between audiences, cultures and neighbourhoods.
