Coca: Ancestral Plant and Contested Symbol
Mamma Coca Presenting the Divine Plant to the Old World
Coca Plant
Cultivated Coca Varieties and Landscapes of South America
The Khoka Project classifies coca (Erythroxylum spp.) into four major cultivated types, each tied to specific landscapes and traditions. Hayo (E. novogranatense var. novogranatense) was grown in pre-Columbian Colombia, especially in the Magdalena and Cauca valleys and the Sierra Nevada region. Thupa coca (E. novogranatense var. truxillense), known for its large “royal” leaves, likely originated on Peru’s northern desert coast and spread into the Andes and the Inca world, remaining common from Ecuador to northern Chile. Mamox coca (E. coca var. coca), linked to Andean highlands and humid eastern slopes, was cultivated from eastern Ecuador to Bolivia and the Amazonian foothills. Ipadu (E. coca var. ipadu), native to the lowland Amazon, has long been central to daily and ritual life among Indigenous groups of Brazil, Colombia, and Peru. Across South America, coca has been used for millennia for spiritual, medicinal, and social purposes, each variety adapted to a distinct ecological zone and cultural tradition.
Coca Varieties in South America
Medellín Museum of Modern Art
Founded in 1978, the Medellín Museum of Modern Art took shape as a civic insistence that contemporary art belongs in public life in a city often framed through industry and violence. Housed in a converted steelworks in Ciudad del Río and expanded in the 2010s, it turns adaptive reuse into a statement about Medellín’s cultural reinvention. Through exhibitions, film, and a collection centered on Colombian and Latin American work, the museum tracks how experiment, politics, and everyday materials can hold memory and register lives lived through change.
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