Vegetal Narratives with Tatiana Arocha

The workshop is currently at capacity - if you would like to be added to the waiting list please email us@canalprojects.org

Liana’s first public workshop invites the artist Tatiana Arocha, whose work reveals a process of communing with plants through a personal lexicon of textures resulting from rubbing, photographing, preserving, and tracing the forest’s bark, seeds, and leaves. This process has been enhanced by her conversations with indigenous people who possess ancestral and contemporary knowledge of the local ecology. In this workshop, Tatiana will share her research on the coca plant, which began in 2008 and will guide us through techniques present in her work, such as frottage, imprinting, and plant pressing.

Tatiana Arocha (1974) is a Colombian artist based in New York. Her art practice explores the intimacy between people and land, rooted in personal memory and her immigrant experience. It centers on community through public art interventions and transdisciplinary knowledge exchange. Arocha’s works often bring to life and reconstruct the vulnerable tropical forests of her homeland, addressing the ecological, emotional, and cultural losses caused by extractive economies and colonial practices. By interweaving historical and contemporary technologies, Arocha’s unconventional process and craft express her layered relationship with nature and cultural transformation.

Liana Collective will host a space for knowledge exchange with Tatiana Arocha and open to artists, herbalists, native thinkers, researchers, and the general public interested in being part of an experience of plant-human transferences. Through collective creation and dialogue, the participants will be encouraged to perceive terrestrial narratives and challenge Western perspectives on nature, striving to convey the expressions and knowledge of plants. Participants will explore the language of the coca leaf and other medicinal herbs by feeling them and leaving their imprints on paper. This space will bring a conversation about the plants’ agency, their relationship to healing practices, and elements such as smell, texture, color, and contrast while experimenting with printed compositions and pigments.