Botanical Readings: Erythroxylum Coca is an installation by the artist Ximena Garrido-Lecca (Peru, 1980), presented at proyectoamil in Lima, 2019. The piece was composed by a hydroponic structure for the cultivation of coca plants, whose leaves—and their divinatory ancestral possibilities—answered the questions that visitors had about their own future. This publication reviews the different historical and visual layers that make up the installation, where the coca is inserted as an agent whose circulation, consumption and significance resist the impetus that, from the West, has tried to inventory the desires and stories contained within it; while at the same time continues growing as a living input of the colonial capitalist machine.
