The coca plant is one of the world’s most controversial plants. In the West, it is primarily associated with the recreational drug cocaine, which was first produced in Europe in the nineteenth century and has given rise to a violent system of drug trade and abuse. The plant’s healing and stimulating properties have endowed it with cultural and spiritual significance for the indigenous population of the Andes region, yet this fact has gone rarely mentioned in history books, pointing to the Western hegemony of knowledge among other factors. Since 2018, Colombian filmmaker Laura Huertas Millán has examined the coca plant in her work.

Her exhibition, Curanderxs (Spanish for “healers”), includes the eponymous multi-channel projection newly produced in 2024 as part of the After Nature . Ulrike Crespo Photography Prize as well as two further video installations. In her new work, Huertas Millán takes the initial prohibition of the coca plant by the Spanish while colonizing Latin America and develops a speculative narrative with a group of femmes who secretly distribute coca leaves in the seventeenth century. In response to the limited existing sources, the artist uses fiction as a strategy to imagine a fragmentary narrative about the colonialist appropriation of nature. Using an aesthetic of early silent films that references the archive’s silence, bold actors emerge from the dark depths of underground landscapes, offering support to enslaved indigenous workers by secretly distributing coca leaves.

Bangladeshi photographer Sarker Protick spans a range of temporalities in his exhibition অঙ্গার . Awngar. Protick reveals the connection between the history of colonization across the Indian subcontinent and the ongoing exploitation of the individuals and ecosystems of this region by exploring the historic region of Bengal, which includes Bangladesh and parts of present-day India.

In this, his photographic investigation resembles field research. Like many of his works, অঙ্গার . Awngar is a long-term project. The focus is the nineteenth-century establishment of a train network and the coal mining under the colonial domination of the British Empire.

The prize, endowed with a total of 80,000 euros, is awarded annually to two artists whose work questions the relationship between man, nature and technology. It is the second highest endowed prize in the field of photography in Europe. In addition to the prize, it includes an exhibition at C/O Berlin – a renowned exhibition venue for photography and visual media – and at Crespo Open Space in Frankfurt, as well as an accompanying publication. It is named after the founder and photographer Ulrike Crespo. In numerous photographic series, she has intensively explored the themes of landscape and nature and in her works presents a natural world that appears both impressive and fragile in the face of the increasingly noticeable effects of the climate crisis.