ʻI Speak for the Forest, for the Rivers, for the Ancestors Who Keep Conversing Through the Mambe’: Aimema Úai paints Murui-Muina continuity

For Murui-Muina artist and mambeólogo Aimema Úai (La Chorrera, Colombian Amazon), painting is a way of thinking with the forest. By combining mambe, wito, dragon’s blood, and oil on canvas, Aimema transforms the maloka—the ceremonial house and spiritual center of the Murui-Muina people—into a place of continuity and resistance. As a descendent of those who survived the mass enslavement and extermination of Indigenous peoples during the region’s rubber boom from 1850 to 1930, Aimema carries the memory of the genocide. His paintings read as cartographies of Murui-Muina continuity, and in them, the maloka endures as a living structure from which Indigenous futures are imagined. 

In Murui-Muina tradition, the maloka is a house, school, and temple that organizes social, spiritual, and political life. For Aimema, it is the spiritual infrastructure of his people, “the house where we mambeamos, dream, and speak with the earth.” Mambear refers to ritually chewing coca leaf powder (jiibie in the mɨnɨka language, or mambe in Spanish) a preparation made from toasted coca leaves mixed with the ashes of the sacred yarumo tree. This practice sets the word in motion and accompanies conversations that guide and harmonize collective thought. 

“Wherever we mambeamos,” Aimema says, “the word lights up to take care of the world.” Within Murui-Muina cosmology, jiibie activates a vital force associated with the feminine, one that nourishes word, thought, and the balance between body, territory, and spirit.

As historian Óscar Aponte notes, the maloka was, and remains, the ceremonial and political heart of Murui-Muina life, a space where ritual, dialogue, and authority are enacted, sustained by mambe, conversation, and dance. However, during the rubber boom, its destruction, abandonment, or absence led to accelerated dislocation and the disintegration of community structures.

The social fabric was violently torn apart by the Peruvian Amazon Company (known as Casa Arana) founded in 1899 by Julio César Arana and financed by British capital, which imposed a regime of slavery and extermination in the Putumayo region. Rubber extracted under torture traveled from Iquitos and Manaus to Liverpool and New York, feeding the factories of Goodyear, Firestone, and U.S. Rubber Company. The arrival of Casa Arana marked the beginning of an unprecedented physical and cultural destruction of the Murui-Muina and other Indigenous nations of the area. Most of the Native societies were destroyed. 

For the survivors, rebuilding a communal house was both an act of remembrance and a blueprint for the future. “The Murui-Muina population was flexible and recursive enough to accommodate their lives and start the challenging process of recreating Murui-Muina life in a new setting,” Aponte writes. Aimema’s work embodies what Aponte calls “the reconstruction of Indigenous societies in Amazonia after the rubber boom,” when the peoples of the Putumayo rebuilt the world through word, dance, and the communal house. In his paintings, the maloka is not a ruin or metaphor but a living system of thought that continues to generate balance among body, territory, and memory. His work emerges from a teaching often repeated by his elders: “The maloka is the body of the world. The entire universe is there. When we dance or paint, we are rebuilding that house.” 

In Murui-Muina cosmology, the maloka rests on four spiritual foundations expressed through ritual dances—Yadiko, Meniza+ (Charapa), Yuaki, and Cacería—each embodying a principle of balance. Yadiko, the dance of the anaconda, connects the three worlds and represents knowledge. Charapa, the turtle dance, regulates the excesses of body and spirit, teaching patience and the slow rhythm of good living. Yuaki, the fruit dance, celebrates abundance and reciprocity between humans and the forest. Cacería, the hunting dance, calls forth the mountain spirits and guardian animals to sustain equilibrium with the forest. Together, these dances form a ritual ecology of renewal through which the ni mayrama—the great sage or maloquero, keeper of the maloka—and the dance owners sustain territorial order through knowledge, song, and movement. 

It was within the maloka that Aimema was first introduced to the knowledge of the plants and chose to become a mambeólogo, a student and guardian of coca as medicine. His path as an artist began there, where painting became another way of listening to the forest. At the center of every maloka is the mambeadero, a living chamber of dialogue where word, coca, and tobacco intertwine. Aimema’s pigments are drawn from the substances of his territory: mambe, wito fruit, dragon’s blood resin, rubber resin, achiote, yarumo ashes and the charcoal from the wood used to toast the mambe—plants of power activated through prayer and dialogue before painting begins. He does not treat them as materials but as living allies, technologies of relation that continue breathing on the canvas. The greens, ochres, and reds of his work arise from that exchange between matter and spirit, each color holding a living memory of the land.

In his series Moo Buinaima Jofo / La Casa donde se Mambea /The House Where Words Are Chewed (2023–2025), white lines evoke the pillars of the maloka; green and ochre tones recall the forest and tobacco; and the red background carries the vital warmth of the word. His paintings depict living malokas—spaces where people dance and converse with the coca leaf—and chagras, gardens that condense the agricultural and spiritual knowledge of his people. The chagra, literally a “garden of life,” is both field and school of transmission, where balance among beings is practiced daily.

In 2024, as part of Liana Collective, I invited Aimema to exhibit three works in COCAWOR(L)DS, a show we curated to challenge the stigmas surrounding the coca plant and to reclaim its spiritual and cultural significance. Months later, after a new maloka was built in his territory, Aimema revisited and repainted two of them. The House Where Words Are Chewed acquired brighter colors—“because the maloka is now alive and materialized”—while Basket of Origin was veiled in ash pigments, as if the fire of the word had left its trace on the canvas. “My thoughts change, and so does the work,” Aimema says. “The painting evolves as my thought evolves; nothing remains still.”

Aimema’s paintings bridge his Indigenous society and his interlocutors in the city. He lives between Bogotá and La Chorrera, in the Amazon region, more than 700 kilometers from Colombia’s capital. “People often ask why I paint here, far from my territory,” he told me. “But that’s what the medicines instructed. Mambe doesn’t exist only there, in the maloka. Painting is also a way of mambear—across other times, other places—a way of making worlds speak to one another.”

Aimema’s studio in Bogotá functions as an urban maloka: a space of conversation between worlds and where painting acts as mediator. I met him there, just days before his trip to Belém do Pará, Brazil, where he would present a series of painted malokas during the 2025 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30). This summit is the first ever held in the Amazon, where hundreds of Indigenous and social defenders seek to shift global climate negotiations from rhetoric to repair. Two of his works had already arrived in the country as part of the Second Amazon Biennial. In both spaces, his paintings act as portals for conversation and as visual reflections on the cosmologies that sustain life in the forest amid the extractive regimes that threaten it. Just as painting connects times and territories, his presence in international forums such as COP30 and the Amazon Biennial expands the forest’s voice into global decision-making spaces. Aimema does not travel as an observer but as a carrier of the word, reminding us that art can also be a practice of collective listening.

“I don’t speak only for myself,” he says. “I speak for the forest, for the rivers, for the ancestors who keep conversing through the mambe. Painting also carries that word, because it keeps speaking where we no longer are.” Aimema Úai’s work thus sustains a double dimension: restoring the spiritual memory of the Murui-Muina people and projecting it into the present. “Without dance, the house falls. Without mambe, the word dries up. That’s why I paint—to keep the house standing.”