What Humans See as Blood, Jaguars See as Chicha

Filmmaker Luciana Decker Orozco’s project looks at film as a continuation of the tradition of telling, listening, and imagining oral histories.

Luciana Decker Orozco

Laura Huertas Millán

Titled What Humans See as Blood, Jaguars See as Chicha, the work investigates storytelling about deities, sacred objects, and spaces in the Andes. It seeks to highlight remembrances and customs of relating to nature, space, and the unusual geological formations in Kalaque, in the artist’s native Bolivia, which owes its name to the rocky mountains that make up the region.

The work also aims to point toward a return to collective memories that are non-hegemonic and that contain a different understanding of the spaces we inhabit, and asks whether such storytelling will enhance our ability to form more ecologically sound relationships.

Decker Orozco will complete the project accompanied by artist and filmmaker Laura Huertas Millán in the framework of Forecast. Millán said: “Working with and through notions of expanded kinship, indigeneity, mestizaje, and anti-colonialism, Orozco raises crucial matters of sovereignty, ecological sustainability, political resistance and worldmaking in a context marked by inequality and violence. Her work embodies, in ways that I relate to, the links between art and research, pushing the limits of discursive language through filmmaking’s craftsmanship. I‘m looking forward to developing a longterm conversation with her on the urgent topics that her project raises, while accompanying her riveting artistic process.”