Project by Valeria Ramirez @valeriaramirezt
It all begins with Erythroxylum coca, a plant that for thousands of years held cultural, medicinal, and spiritual value across the Andes. After cocaine was isolated and the coca leaf was criminalized in 1961, the plant came to be defined only by one extract and one narrative.
In Colombia, this legal and political shift has produced landscapes marked by militarization, surveillance, eradication, and chemical concentration: from the substances used in clandestine processing laboratories to glyphosate dispersed across rural territories.
This project asks what new territorial realities could emerge if coca were legalized. Located near Orito, Colombia, it imagines a speculative 60-hectare sanctuary where a network of parallel infrastructures choreographs new encounters with the plant through cultivation, research, ritual, tourism, production, and regulation. Housing clusters, river ports, processing facilities, research pods, trails, meditation spaces, and control towers form an overlapping landscape where previously hidden systems become visible and open to negotiation.
In the end, the project reimagines an entire territorial system and becomes a way of advocating for the plant—shifting how it is seen, understood, and engaged beyond the single narrative that has defined it.
