MA-QUINA (Quinine Machine)
Sebastian Wiedemann

“Colonial ghosts do not stop h(a)unting and devouring vegetalities” Sebastian Wiedemann writes. Colonial demand for quinine – the alkaloid taken from Cinchona bark – turned a local Indigenous remedy into a global commodity. Europeans raced to harvest bark and plant cinchona at scale, clearing forests and replacing diverse ecosystems with plantations. That extraction reshaped land use, dispossessed communities, and in some places drove trees to the brink of local extinction. What began as knowledge shared between people and place became part of industrial supply chains that were environmentally unstable from the start: monocultures, soil loss, and weakened ecological resilience followed in the wake of profit-driven production.

Using archival images, feverish montage and evocations of Bora and Uitoto conjuring, MA-QUINA traces the plant’s journey from forest to plantation to pharmacy to archive. MA-QUINA confronts another kind of inundation: the social and ecological violence of commodification which results in deforestation, ecological disruption and the erasure of Indigenous knowledge.