Colombian-French filmmaker and artist Laura Huertas Millán joins us to mark the closing of her Villa Albertine residency (in partnership with A.I.R. Gallery and AWARE) and to share recent projects. Since 2018, Huertas Millán’s work has addressed the fraught legacy of the coca plant, tracing how its reduction to a lucrative commodity and illicit substance (in the form of cocaine) suppressed its economic, cultural, and spiritual value to Andean societies. Two recent moving-image installations, shown here in a special theatrical presentation, work to reclaim this narrative: Para La Coca (2023) evokes the teachings of the coca through an origin myth of the Muina Murui Colombian First Nations, while Curanderxs (2024) blends decolonial research and speculative fiction. Following the films, the artist will present her new body of work, Shadowboxing, including work-in-progress footage shot during her time in New York. Delving into the social and gender forces in the world of boxing, the project intertwines auto-ethnographic research (Huertas Millán’s grandfather was a semi-professional boxer in Colombia), encounters with different diasporic communities in Europe and the Americas, and embodied filmic experimentation.
While seemingly disparate, these two projects propose unexpected connections central to the artist’s practice. From extractive histories to the movement of bodies across borders today, how can cinematic forms catalyze new states of consciousness, where domination, harm, stigmatization, and othering used to be? The screening will be followed by a conversation with Huertas Millán, moderated by Sophie Cavoulacos, associate curator in the Department of Film.
Program approx. 80 min.