Laura Huertas Millán

Laura Huertas Millán is a French-Colombian artist and filmmaker. Entwining ethnography, ecology, fiction and historical enquiries, her moving image work engages with strategies of survival, resistance and resilience against violence. Building complex visual and sonic worlds infused by the real, her cinematographic practice circulates between contemporary art venues and international film festivals. Part of the official selections of the Viennale (Vienna), the Toronto International Film Festival, the New York Film Festival, La Habana or Cinéma du Réel (Paris), her films have earned prizes in Locarno, FIDMarseille, Doclisboa and Videobrasil, among others. She has participated in screenings and exhibitions in institutions such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York), the Centre Pompidou (Paris), Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume (Paris), Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín, Les Laboratories d´Aubervilliers, Western Front (Vancouver) and Instituto de Visión (Bogotá). Retrospectives of her films have been held at the ICA (London), Mar del Plata Film festival, Toronto´s Cinematheque (TIFF Lightbox) and the Flaherty Seminar. Her works are part of public and private collections as the Kadist Foundation (Paris-San Francisco), the Centre National des Arts Plastiques (CNAP) and the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (Miami). She is currently preparing her first feature film, after completing in 2017 a PhD between PSL University (SACRe program) and the Sensory Ethnography Lab (Harvard University). Laura Huertas Millán’s films circulate between contemporary art and cinema. Entwining anthropology, ecology and historical enquiries, her moving image practice engages with strategies of survival, resistance, and resilience against violence. For the past years, she has created a series of “ethnographic fictions”, which are accompanied by a thorough research around that cinematographic concept. For the Future Generation Art Prize Huertas Millán created a new work Let My People Go, an expanded cinema piece presented as a five-channel installation. The main character of the narrative is the coca plant, which in the Colombian Amazon is the highest sacred entity for the Muina-Muruí indigenous community, and it is venerated as a feminine being source of power and wisdom. Huertas Millán new immersive work plunges us into the ritualistic elaboration of the mambe, the green powder used for its worship. By representing an emancipatory use of this psychotropic substance, far from the mainstream stereotypes of cocaïne and violence, Let my people go stages an embodied dialogue with a natural being.