Tatiana Arocha, whose installations combine natural materials with digitally altered components, will close the 2023 MacDowell Downtown season of First Fridays Nov. 3 at the Monadnock Center for History and Culture. Beginning at 7:30 p.m., Arocha will present still images and video to immerse the audience in representations of the forests of her native Colombia.

The doors of Bass Hall will open at 7 p.m. with light refreshments served, and the presentation starts at 7:30 p.m.

“My work has always touched on the War on Drugs and its environmental and social effects in Colombia,” she said of her full-time pursuit over the past decade.

A graphic designer and illustrator by education and trade, Arocha, a first-time MacDowell fellow, sees the impacts of the U.S. War on Drugs, which got its start during the Nixon administration, in the displacement of indigenous Amazonians, loss of rainforest and suppression of culture.

“I want to promote conversation to examine the connections between the War on Drugs and depletion of the rainforest,” she said.

Employing drawings, rubbings, photography and sculptural objects, Arocha’s installations intricately weave her physical representations of the natural world with those of the sociopolitical forces at work using the bark, seeds and leaves of endangered and misunderstood plants. She uses digital processes and tools from her career as a design-in-motion artist to generate textures, layers and patterns that take many forms.

One such plant is coca, which has had many traditional uses among Indigenous peoples in the rainforest aside from its notorious psychoactive derivative, cocaine.

“Because of the conflicts surrounding the illegal trade in coca, much Indigenous knowledge of the plant has been erased,” Arocha said. “Rainforest is being depleted, water polluted. I am trying to connect people to the land, people to people, making conversation through imagery.”

At MacDowell, Arocha is developing visual vocabularies related to colonization and the so-called scientific discovery of cocaine, which in the 1800s rewrote the uses and significance of the plant along “modern” Western attitudes, ignoring and replacing its many Indigenous uses. Her work explores the evolution of modern society’s marketing of cocaine as a toothache cure, a fortified wine by the Catholic Church and, of course, putting the pep in Coca-Cola. Through video, she “reverse-engineers” the branding she sees in those campaigns, together with the War on Drugs.

Through this interrogation, she is helping to drive a dialogue toward peaceful and nondestructive outcomes.

If you go

Who: Installation artist Tatiana Arocha

What: MacDowell Downtown, Nov. 3, 7:30 to 8:30 p.m.

Where: The Monadnock Center for History and Culture at 19 Grove St., Peterborough

Jonathan Gourlay is senior manager for external communications at MacDowell.