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Vega Macotela, José Antonio

Chewed coca leaves José Antonio Vega Macotela’s work takes informal modes of exchange as opportunities to investigate the ways that seemingly banal material objects can serve as poetic measures of time. One such object litters the mines of Oruro and Potosí in Bolivia in the form of boleos, wads of coca leaves that are discarded after having been packed into a miner’s cheek over the course of a workday. The analgesic properties of unrefined coca leaves assuage the miners’ hunger and dispel their aches and pains, allowing them to work long shifts on little food and with little rest, thereby transforming a bodily debt into mineral riches. Coca also figures prominently in ritual offerings to Tio, a devilish figure whom Bolivian miners regard as the spiritual owner of the mine: in exchange for coca leaves and cigarettes deposited at his underground altars, Tio grants miners permission to withdraw mineral resources from his property (Taussig 1980). The boleo in Study of Exhaustion was amassed and sculpted in a miner’s cheek over the course of a day’s labour; to obtain it, Vega spent ten days at the miner’s beck and call. The object thus sits at the confluence of multiple chains of equivalence, linking wage labour, spiritual intercession, and artistic practice in a single, entangled economy. CMF