BIO
Susan Sontag writes “Everything shown is equally present, no matter when it takes place”.
Artist and filmmaker Laura Huertas Millán’s practice spans across different media: the moving image, writing, pedagogy, and long term enquiries. Her early films (such as La Historia, 2005) were already haunted by her upbringing in Bogota, Colombia, a country mired in civil war and her experiences as a female first generation economic immigrant in France, where she has been working and living for more than twenty years. Profoundly marked by her native environment characterized by daily and pervasive violence, where storytelling was weaponized by armed forces from various political fronts, Huertas Millan’s works challenge oppressive narratives through experimental fiction-making. Her practice communicates a deep effort to understand the living together from a conscious, meaningful perspective, perhaps following the legacy of the Colombian household of low-income artists where she grew up, where culture and politics intertwined, and art was a space for alternative stories, joy, community, and survival.
Her slow research methodologies impregnante the camera to valorise the people she encounters throughout her films, in an attempt to deconstruct cinema and its traditional structures, to decenter and decolonize the field. Central to this approach is the series developed from 2009 to 2012 exploring the theme of 'exoticism,' which includes Aequador (2011), and Journey to a Land Otherwise Known (2012). These films dismantle colonial narratives of othering and racial oppression that undergo deconstruction through the lenses of sci-fi, speculative fiction, and lo-fi fantasy with a sharp criticism of anthropology. In subsequent years, partly independently and partly at the Sensory Ethnography Lab she developped 'Ethnographic Fictions,' a series of works that includes Sol Negro (2016), La Libertad (2017), and jeny303 (2018). The “Ethnographic Fictions” concept offers a duality of intricate definitions that are key to understanding the complexity of her work: the acknowledgment that ethnography, initially perceived as a collection of narratives rooted in colonialism, can be viewed as a form of fiction-making. And simultaneously, contemporary efforts in decolonial ethnographic practices have embraced tools from the realm of fiction. Distancing herself from the patriarchal and euro centered “ethnofictions” of classical visual anthropology, she carved a unique diasporic path and artistic cinematic language.
As this series of work led her to consider stories of generational trauma, mental illness, displacement, ecology, and gendered violence, her practice has naturally moved towards a reflection on cinema as an alternative state, a space for resilience and healing. Since 2018, Laura Huertas Millan has critically engaged with the notion of 'pharmakon’ (an entity both poison and remedy), producing The Labyrinth (2018) and Jíibie (2019), challenging prevailing discourse implications surrounding the coca plant, a demonized plant in the Americas since colonialism.Traditionally cultivated in the lower altitudes of the eastern slopes of the Andes, the plant was criminalized during the European invasion, to erase indigenous economies and spiritual practices around her. In the present day, forced eradication of illicit cultivation of coca is executed in the most aggressive way by aerial spraying with herbicides (fumigation) causing chemical pollution, livelihood destruction, deforestation, and displacement. Its illegal trafficking offers a continuation to the war on drugs that continues to fuel Colombia’s never-ending war and neocolonialism. In the past ten years, Huertas Millan has been doing fieldwork in the Amazon forest, where she spent time learning from, working and connecting with the elder (abuelo) Cristobal Gomez Abel, aBora and Murui inhabitant of the forest, who became a long time teacher of the power of the plant, and film collaborator. These latest works produced in the Amazon are somewhere between historical documents, myths, and fictional stories, and are built as spaces to advocate to decriminalize our relationships with plants and make a tribute to the indigenous resistances in Abya Yala, that have allowed the transmission of kinship, knowledge, collaborations and living with and among nature.
All of these films not only trace a constellation to understand Laura’s body of research, they also stand alone as immersive pieces of contemporary art where the artist builds visual and sonic worlds contributing a nuanced dimension to the experiential aspects of the recorded scenes. Paired with a long-term research around colonialism, violence against human and more-than-human peoples, LHM’s films address key aspects, still unresolved, in the power dynamics between Europe and the Global South offering new perspectives analyzing pluralities. She pours from the screen something sacred, decisively to an imaginary of a living-together that has yet to unfold.
Text by Noelia Portela, Laura Huertas Millán. Nouveau Regard Prize AWARE 2024
Laura Huertas Millán is an artist, filmmaker, and writer from Colombia, based in France. She holds a PhD from PSL University (SACRe program) developed at the Sensory Ethnography Lab (Harvard University). More than twenty film retrospectives of her work have been held internationally. Her films have been shown in leading world cinema festivals and won prizes at the Locarno Film Festival, FIDMarseille, Doclisboa and Videobrasil. She had solo exhibitions at the MASP São Paulo, Maison des Arts de Malakoff and Medellin’s Modern Art Museum. Her films have also been exhibited and screened at the Centre Pompidou, Jeu de Paume, Guggenheim Museum in NYC, Times Art Berlin and presented in biennials such as the Liverpool, FRONT Triennial, Videobrasil, Videonale & Sharjah Biennial.
About the Work
“French-Colombian visual artist and filmmaker Laura Huertas Millán blends the cinematic with critical and alternative ethnographies, presenting viewers with a unique form of speculative fiction that explores subjectivity and history. Drawing from field work, relationships, autobiography, collaborations, and long-term research, her works reflect the complex realities and ecologies produced by colonialism. The artist traces alternate histories by hybridising archives, first-person accounts and myths with immersive and intuitive cinematography, taking viewers along composite narratives across foliage, time and space”.
Hoor Al Qasimi and Jiwon Lee, Sharjah Biennial 15, Thinking Historically in the Present.
“Huertas Millán’s work is varied and singular, a developing practice that has a basis in anthropology and documentary filmmaking but borrows freely from visual art (often rejecting the conventions of all three). Her films mix modes willfully, blending fictitious devices with more traditional documentary techniques, and all hold a strong regard for aesthetics, foregrounding formal concerns while emphasising the role of the camera, and indeed, the filmmaker too. They tend to involve the participants in the process, letting the (primarily female) subjects speak for themselves and allowing them to shape the direction of the story; or use quotation, found-footage, human or architectural actors to introduce extra-textual elements into the film that sit beside that which is being directly depicted.”
Matt Turner, The fabric of freedom: Laura Huertas Millán’s ethnographic filmmaking, in Sight & Sound Magazine, 8 August 2019
“To record others as they undertake this constitution of the self through speech, as Laura Huertas Millán does in works she terms “ethnographic fictions,” is to engage in a meta-discourse. Huertas Millán’s films speak about speech—about who can speak, of what, and how. She listens, creating scenarios in which her subjects relay thoughts and experiences. She asks how speech—whether linguistic or filmic—creates reality and subjectivity. The inquiry is fitting given the artist’s longstanding interest in ethnography: both ethnography and speech are, after all, forms of encounter between identity and alterity. In the works Huertas Millán has assembled for “the spring song,” the expressions of the films’ subjects and the expressions of the films themselves—each existing only by virtue of the other—mutually generate a space of fabulation and reflection. They create a forum of voicing while knowing that speech is not free; it may be more or less so, but never purely, always informed by convention, history, struggle”. (…)
Erika Balsom, Speaking into Being: The Ethnographic Fictions of Laura Huertas Millán, in The spring song. le chant du Printemps exhibition booklet (Maison des Arts, Centre d’art contemporain de Malakoff), 2018.
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2017
Visual Arts Practice-based PhD, PSL University.
Dissertation: Eclats et Disparitions. Ethnographic Fictions
Committee: Alain Bonfand (Adviser), François-René Martin, Marie-José Burki, Philippe Bettinelli and Jacques Aumont.
École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris, École Nationale Supérieure Rue d’Ulm (SACRe program), Paris, France.2014
Visiting Fellow, Sensory Ethnography Lab and Department of Art, Film and Visual Studies Harvard University, Cambridge, USA.
2012
Master degree, summa cum laude, Le Fresnoy, studio national des arts contemporains, Tourcoing, France.
2009
MFA, summa cum laude, École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris, France. 2006 BA, École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris, France.
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2020
Best Film Prize, international competition, Festival Curtas Belo Horizonte,Brazil.
2018
Emerging Artist Award, Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO), Miami, USA.
Best Direction Prize, Pardo di domani competition, Locarno Film Festival, Switzerland.Best experimental film, Bogoshorts, Colombia.
Best Editing, National competition, Bogoshorts, Colombia.
Best Script, National competition, Bogoshorts, Colombia.
Shortlisted, Future Generation Art Prize, PinchuckArtCenter, Kiev, Ukraine.
2017Best Film, National Competition, MIDBO, Bogota, Colombia.
Grand Prix, Biennale de la Jeune Création Européenne (BJC), Montrouge, France.Conseil départemental des Hauts-de-Seine Prize, Salon de Montrouge, France.
2016
Grand Prix Jury’s mention, international competition, Doclisboa, Lisboa, Portugal. Grand Prix Jury’s mention, French competition, FIDMarseille, Marseille, France.
2014
Grand Prix Jury’s mention, Bienal de la Imagen en movimiento, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
2013
Arquetopia Resartis Prize, Videobrasil Biennale, Sao Paulo, Brazil.
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2023
Sharjah Art Biennial, Works 2011-2023, Al Dhaid Old Clinic, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates.
2019
Video Room: Laura Huertas Millán, Sao Paulo Museum of Art (MASP), Brazil.
2018
le chant du printemps. the spring song. Maison des Arts – Centre d’art de Malakoff, France.
2016
Ficción etnográfica. Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín, Colombia.
Disappearing operations. Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, ENSBA, Paris, France.2013
Aequador, Ici, Là-bas et Lisboa (duo). Villa Arson, Nice, France.
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2023
Laura Huertas Millan: Ethnographic Fictions as Deconstruction and Reinvention, E-Flux screening room, New York, US.
2022
Laura Huertas Millan. Image Policies. Vienna Film Museum, Vienna, Austria.
2021
Ethnographic Fictions: Spotlight on Laura Huertas Millan, MUBI (online).
2019
Ethnofictions by Laura Huertas Millan. Harvard Film Archive, Cambridge, USA.
Retrospective Laura Huertas Millán, Colombian Cinematheque, Bogota, Colombia.
2018
Retrospective Laura Huertas Millán. Festival de Mar del Plata, Argentina.
The ethno-fictions of Laura Huertas Millán. ICA, Londres, UK.
Ethnographic Fictions. School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, USA.
Two films by Laura Huertas Millán. OCA, Oslo, Norway.2017
MDFF presents Laura Huertas Millán, TIFF Lightbox, Toronto, Canada. Flaherty Seminar, New York, USA.
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2023
Sharjah Biennial, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates.
Woven Histories, LACMA, Los Angeles, US.
LAC Museum, Lugano, Switzerland
Batalha Cinema Center, Porto, Portugal.
Proa Foundation, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
EMAF, Osnabrück, Germany
The Measure of the World, Radius, Center for Contemporary Art and Ecology, Delft, The Netherlands. Climate of Cinema: Isles and the Planet, Museum of Contemporary Art, Busan, South Korea. Forecast Festival, Radial System, Berlin, Germany.
Seed Index, Eastside Projects, Birmingham, UK.2022
AnoZero, Coimbra Biennial, Coimbra, Portugal.
Belleza y devastación (Beauty and Devastation), Green Parrot, Barcelona, Spain.
Index Seminum, Kunsthalle Bratislava, Slovakia.
Unravelling Stories: Women Artists in KADIST and Videobrasil Collections, online, Kadist.tv.2021
Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool, UK.
One song is very much like another, and the boat is always from afar, Times Museum, Guangzhou, China.
A common breath, La Loge, Bruxelles, Belgium
Reclaiming Places, La Loge, Bruxelles, Belgium.
Ires y venires, Banco de la Republica, Bogota, Colombia.
Planted in the body, Meet Factory, Prague, Czech Republic.
Never spoke again, Telfair Museum, Savannah, USA.
Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany.
Crossing Currents, Galerie Nordenhake, Mexico D.C., Mexico.2020
Measures of Proximity, EKKM Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia, Tallin, Estonia. Tiempos Inciertos III, Sostener las vidas, Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain. Ethnographic Fictions, Republics Re-imagined, UnionDocs, Brooklyn, USA.
Esta Historia no es la Historia, Espacio Odeon, Bogota, Colombia.2019
The Life of Things, Momenta Biennale, Montreal, Canada.
Future Generation Art Prize. Palazzo Ca’Tron, Venice Biennale, Italy.
Future Generation Art Prize. PinchuckArtCenter, Kiev, Ukraine.
Neither Black/Red/Yellow nor Woman, Times Arts Center, Berlin, Germany.
Paroxysm of Sublime. LACE, Los Angeles, USA.
Videonale Biennial. Kunstmuseum, Bonn, Germany.
Here/Now, Current visions from Colombia. Framer Framed, Amsterdam, Netherlands.2018
CIFO 2018 Grants and commissions. Centro Cultural Metropolitano, Quito, Ecuador. Front Triennial. Transformer Station, Cleveland, USA.
A hole in Time. CAC La Traverse, Alfortville, France.
These hands. Western Front, Vancouver, Canada.
Nuevos Nombres. Banco de la Republica, Bogota, Colombia.
Prospectif cinéma. Centre Pompidou, Paris, France.
A la lisière du quotidien. Jeu de Paume, Paris, France.
The Flaherty Seminar. Washington Gallery of Art, USA.
Working from the future past. Seoul Art Museum (SEMA), Seoul, Korea.2015
A Decolonial Atlas. Off Biennale Cairo, Cairo, Egypt.
Unspeakable practices, unnatural acts. Ruangrupa, Jakarta, Indonesia.2014
Tropical Uncanny. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA.
Bienal de la Imagen en Movimiento. Buenos Aires, Argentina.2013
Videobrasil Biennial. Sesc Sao Paulo, Brazil.
2012
Le Printemps de Septembre. ISDAT, Toulouse, France.
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2021
London Short Film Festival, UK.
2021
Rencontres Paris Berlin, 20221
2020
Berlinale - Forum Expanded, Germany.
2020
Punto de Vista International Documentary Film Festival, Pampelona, Spain. 2020 Mar del Plata Film Festival, Argentina
2019
Viennale, Austria.
Open City Documentary Festival, London, UK.
Festival de Nuevo cine de La Habana, Cuba.
Frames of Representation – ICA, London, UK.
RIDM - Rencontres Internationales du Documentaire de Montréal, Canada.2018
Locarno Film Festival, Switzerland.
Cinéma du Réel, Paris, France.
New York Film Festival, USA.
TIFF - Toronto International Film festival, Canada.IFFR Rotterdam International Film Festival, Netherlands.
Zinebi International Film Festival, Bilbao, Spain.2017
FIDMarseille, France.
FICUNAM International Film Festival UNAM, Mexico.
DocLisboa, Portugal.
Cartagena International Film Festival, Colombia.
Torino Film Festival, Italy.