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 an exhibition 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?