The latest edition of the Futuro Coca festival happened in July in Santa Marta, Colombia. The festival brought together indigenous, Afro-descendant and peasants communities from across Colombia to create a space to remember the many past uses of the coca leaf and imagine its potential future uses.
Uniting pueblos
Futuro Coca is a platform for cultural, artistic, and productive exhibitions and activities that seeks to have a political impact by positioning new narratives about the coca leaf globally. They bring together the worlds of art, culture, indigeneity, gastronomy, botany, and science into one single cultural circuit. The first two editions were held in 2023 and 2024, in Bogotá and Medellín, respectively.
This latest edition, entitled “Futuro Coca: The Worldweaving Plant” happened within the context of Santa Marta’s 500th anniversary of the city’s Hispanic founding. Developed in partnership with the Colombian Ministry of Culture, Arts and Knowledge, the festival developed several activities, talks and workshops that highlight the value of the coca leaf to regional communities and the Colombian nation. Around 900 people attended the festival, including members of the Wiwa, Kogui, Arhuaco, Kankuamo (from the Santa Marta region), as well as indigenous communities from further away: the Nasa people from the Cauca, the Makuna people of Vaupés, the Katmëntsá, and the peasant community of San Antonio de Rancas, Pasco, Peru, among other peasant and Afro-descendant communities.
According to the festival’s organisers, they wanted to transmit four key messages with its creation.
Firstly, the involvement of the various indigenous people of the Sierra Nevada of Santa Marta must be central to any discussions around the coca leaf’s future. The festival brought many representatives of these communities to share their cultural, spiritual and territorial understanding of the plant.
Secondly, reflecting the name of the festival’s latest edition, they called for society to “unweave and reweave” our relationships between worlds – the worlds of indigenous communities, modern populations, Afro-descendant communities, peasants, collectives and communities of Cauca and the Amazon, and more. This involves deconstructing existing understandings of the coca leaf, and finding – through experiences, words, and inter-connections – new possible realities for coca’s place in society.
Thirdly, the festival emphasises the need for an “ecosystemic awareness” of the coca plant, which exists across the various climates of the Andean region. Developing sustainable policies around its use, cultivation and control is key to reducing environmental damage to the forest, land and wider territories.
Finally, Futuro Coca calls for the construction of a creative, versatile and living vision of the coca plant. From weaving its fibres into fabrics to its unique gastronomic applications, coca has an incredible culinary, sensorial, economic and artistic potential. Coca is not just the base product of cocaine; it is a living, breathing member of the Colombian and Caribbean landscape that can and should be explored through encounters between artists, scholars and other interested fields of knowledge to “weave new narratives and exchange their multiple possibilities”, as Futuro Coca puts it.
TalkingDrugs spoke with Carmen Posada Monroy and Alejandro Osses Saenz, the co-founders of Futuro Coca, who shared testimonies from the festival and spoke on the festival’s proceedings and vision.
“Indigenous peoples have always been a central element of Futura Coca, but this year, we had the privilege of being so close to the Sierra Nevada in Santa Marta, that we were able to bring people from the four indigenous groups that lived there,” Monroy said. “And they all participated, not only as the public or audience, but as the main speakers and artists showcasing their work”.
Futuro Coca’s previous edition was a large-scale festival; this year’s edition was established in a mobile format, meaning the festival can be set up in different locations and scaled appropriately.
The festival set up a market with several stands run by several groups and budding enterprises that demonstrated the plant’s versatility. There, they sold coca-based products, from hair products, cookies, flour, mambé (toasted coca leaves), and coca-infused tucupi (manioc root) sauce. Additionally, there were documentaries, photo exhibitions, artwork and music on display to showcase the vibrant variety of life that exist around coca.
A meeting point between people
Saenz said that many of the indigenous groups gathered referred to Futuro Coca not as a festival, but a meeting point bringing together people that share histories and stories of the plant.
“This exchange between the pueblos [people, communities] of the North and of the South was very important to have an open conversations between pueblos who haven’t had the opportunity to have it, and to think about the future of the leaf could be and how we can work to this future, one that harmonises the plant and doesn’t continue the systematic damage that they continue to suffer since the creation of cocaine, since the fumigation of the land [with the glyphosate herbicide]. All this thinking is part of the effort to restore order to this sacred plant.”
Many communities understand that their relationship with coca may become a tool of power. Gunzareiman Villataña, who is a member of the Futuro Coca team and from the Arhuaco people, commented that coca “is a tool of power as it not only represents who we are, but it’s a way of… opening up doors with the rest of the world.”
Undoing our understanding of the history and uses of the coca leaf is an essential first step to shape its future – one that is more connected to its true indigenous roots, than a precursor to a substance with a globally desired yet highly violent market.
As Ati González of the Arhuaco people put it: “For indigenous people, it’s a plant that we need to recover in the positive sense of the word: recover it to protect it, so that its [future] rights become communal and collective.”
Futuro Coca came to Madrid this past weekend, and will have a London edition next month.
