Laura Huertas Millán

Reworlding Stories

“Stories that connect us to nature in its undomesticated states, stories that allow us to feel and to think as more-than-human beings, stories that excavate and unearth repressed ways of communicating with the natural world.”

Laura Huertas Millán is a French-Colombian artist and filmmaker whose work stands at the intersection of cinema, contemporary art, and research. Entwining experimental ethnography, ecological and decolonial thinking, historical long-term enquiries, and fiction, her moving-image work engages with strategies of resistance and survival. Sensuous and immersive, her films propose embodied, emotional, and reflexive experiences. Third spaces imagined as healing altered states.

Huertas Millán’s films have been shown at major international festivals and have won prizes at the Locarno Film Festival, FIDMarseille, Doclisboa and Videobrasil, among others. More than twenty surveys of her work have been on view around the world, screening in cinematheques and at leading festivals such as Mar del Plata and Rencontres du Documentaire de Montreal.

Aequador, 2012 © Laura Huertas Millan and Le Fresnoy
Aequador, 2012 © Laura Huertas Millan and Le Fresnoy
Sol Negro (Black Sun), 2016 ©Evidencia Films and Les Films du Worso

Her latest solo exhibitions were on view at MASP Sao Paulo, Maison des Arts de Malakoff and Medellin ́s Modern Art Museum. Her films have also been exhibited and screened in art institutions (Centre Pompidou Paris, Jeu de Paume, Guggenheim Museum NY, Times Art Center Berlin) and biennials (Liverpool, FRONT Triennial, Videobrasil, Videonnale). Huertas Millan also works as an educator in academic and alternative spaces. She is part of the artistic, research, and curatorial collective Counter-Encounters (with Onyeka Igwe and Rachael Rakes) on critical anthropology and the aesthetics and politics of the encounter.

JÍIBIE, 2019 ©Laura Huertas Millan
JÍIBIE, 2019 ©Laura Huertas Millan

As a mentor, she seeks artistic practitioners who find space to develop ecological thinking and relationships within audiovisual creation, storytelling, live performance, and enacting and staging narratives. “I’m looking for candidates who see fiction and storytelling as a space of emancipation, freedom, and collective ecological care,” she says, “and also candidates who have to resist systemic and colonial violence through their practices, but who don’t want to alienate their artistic freedom and expansion.”

El Laberinto (The Labyrinth), 2018 ©Laura Huertas Millan
El Laberinto (The Labyrinth), 2018 ©Laura Huertas Millan

Proposals should include “stories that connect us to nature in its undomesticated states, that allow us to feel and to think as more-than-human beings, that excavate and unearth repressed ways of communicating with the natural world.” Applications should address a potential large audience, and involve extensive research, analysis, and the formalization of abstract ideas related to ecology and the climate crisis. Time-based, audiovisual, and narrative-based projects are more than welcome, as are physical practices and live performances. Successful applicants can “expect dialogue to raise complex questions, but also a safe and careful space where they can explore with confidence new ideas and forms, with a committed and passionate interlocutor,” she says.

laurahuertasmillan.com

Watch the video statement to find out more about what Huertas Millán is looking for in applications: