After Coca para comer and Agave, Yuca Brava closes the trilogy Tired Soil, Exuberant Life.
Yuca brava is a toxic tuber, charged with cyanide, yet an essential food for many Amazonian communities. The project explores this apparent contradiction: how can a toxic plant become food? How does it adapt to intensely sunny climates and poor soils?
The work focuses on the relationships that make this transformation possible. It looks at the practices, affects and forms of knowledge circulating between yuca brava, humans, other animals and plants, as well as soils, waters, fire, winds, microorganisms and fungi. Together, they participate in the life of the territory of Puerto Inírida and the many rivers that cross it.
The Amazon is a territory deeply marked by extractivism. For centuries, it has been treated as a reservoir of resources serving Western interests: timber, cinchona, skins, fish, rubber, fibres, but also enslaved humans and animals, cocaine, gold, coltan, uranium and rare earths. Today, its waters are contaminated by mercury and cyanide salts, while riverbeds are dredged and their sediments discharged.
The project asks: what can human and more-than-human beings living in this territory do with all these toxicities? And how can they confront the “civilising” and Christian spectre that still accompanies these forms of domination?
In a present crossed by multiple toxicities, which Indigenous peoples continue to metabolise through their forms of resistance, Yuca Brava is rooted in a form of buen pensar — a practice of thinking grounded in the Andean philosophy of buen vivir.
The project takes shape through the practices and techniques involved in the chemical transformation of yuca brava: technologies that remove its poison and transform it into food.