{"id":10274,"date":"2025-11-24T14:33:54","date_gmt":"2025-11-24T20:33:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/?p=10274"},"modified":"2025-11-25T13:59:51","modified_gmt":"2025-11-25T19:59:51","slug":"laura-huertas-millan-pharmakon-ecologies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/2025\/11\/24\/laura-huertas-millan-pharmakon-ecologies\/","title":{"rendered":"Laura Huertas Mill\u00e1n: Pharmakon Ecologies"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Laura
Laura Huertas Milla\u0301n, The Labyrinth<\/em>, 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Video Data Bank.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Colombian French artist and filmmaker Laura Huertas Mill\u00e1n has earned international acclaim for films as visually rich as they are thought-provoking, weaving together documentary, ethnography, and speculative fiction. Over the past decade, she has focused her practice on the coca plant, using it as a lens to reframe colonial legacies, Indigenous knowledge systems, and the entwined histories of land, labor, and resistance. Drawing on the concept of the\u00a0pharmakon<\/em>\u2014a substance that can both poison and cure\u2014her work reflects on the coca leaf\u2019s place in Andean ecologies and spiritual life, its criminalization under European colonization, and the ecological violence of the drug trade and state-sponsored eradication campaigns. This evening, she returns to CATE to present a selection of films and discuss her larger project, including her long collaboration with Crist\u00f3bal G\u00f3mez Abel\u2014an elder of the Muina Murui communities and former cocaine worker\u2014with whom she is developing a feature-length film on the coca plant, a collaboration that has redefined her approach to film production.

Followed by a conversation between Laura Huertas Mill\u00e1n and the artist and writer Claire Pentecost, co-founder of the experimental cultural space Watershed Art & Ecology. Presented in partnership with Video Data Bank.

<\/em>2018\u20132024, Colombia, France, Belgium
Format: 16 mm and digital
In Spanish and French, with English, French, and Arabic subtitles
60 minutes followed by discussion

PROGRAM

The Labyrinth
<\/em><\/strong>2018, Colombia, France, 21 minutes
In Spanish with English and French subtitles
Winner, Pardo di Domani Best Direction Prize, 2018 Locarno Film Festival<\/em>
<\/em>A voyage into the labyrinthine memories of Crist\u00f3bal G\u00f3mez Abel, who worked for drug lords in the Colombian Amazon during the 1980s. The film traces his journey through the forest and the ruins of a narco\u2019s mansion\u2014modeled after the Carrington estate from the soap opera Dynasty\u2014as it unravels the hallucinatory narrative of a near-death experience.

Para la Coca
<\/em><\/strong>With Crist\u00f3bal G\u00f3mez Abel, 2023, Colombia, France, 14 minutes
In Spanish with English, French, and Arab subtitles<\/em>
Para la Coca<\/em>\u00a0revisits a myth of origin and ancestral law in which the coca plant appears as a deity embodied in the form of a girl who teaches her father and community the \u201cright use\u201d of the plant. Created in collaboration with Crist\u00f3bal G\u00f3mez Abel (Bora\/Muina Murui), the film connects this myth to the contemporary ritual use of coca within Colombia\u2019s native peoples, beyond colonial prohibition and criminalization. The makers acknowledge that the ancestral myth of origin of the coca plant belongs to the Muina Murui and thank them for allowing this interpretation, undertaken with the aim of de-stigmatizing the coca plant and psychotropics, while honoring and amplifying ancestral Indigenous political, cultural, and spiritual resistance in Colombia.

Curanderxs<\/em><\/strong>, select clips and documentation
2024, France, Germany, 21 minutes
No dialogue<\/em>
In this multi-channel installation, Laura Huertas Mill\u00e1n develops a speculative narrative inspired by 17th-century Inquisition archives from Peru and Colombia. These documents mention women condemned for distributing coca leaves after the plant was prohibited under Spanish colonial rule. Blurring history and fiction, the work imagines a collective of femmes who move through subterranean landscapes, offering coca to enslaved Indigenous mine workers for survival. In doing so, Huertas Mill\u00e1n highlights the coca plant\u2019s role in both colonial exploitation and resistance, while drawing a material connection between silver mines\u2014and the silver content of analog film itself.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Laura Huertas Mill\u00e1n<\/strong>\u00a0is a Colombian French artist and award-winning filmmaker whose multifaceted practice bridges visual art, cinema, and decolonial research. Drawing from ethnography, ecology, literature, and fiction, her films challenge oppressive narratives through experimental forms. She has been the subject of more than twenty solo film retrospectives internationally, and her films have screened at major festivals including the Berlin International Film Festival, Locarno Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Toronto International Film Festival, FIDMarseille \u2013 International Documentary Film Festival, and Doclisboa International Film Festival (Lisbon), where they have received numerous awards. Her work has also been exhibited at institutions such as The Museum of Modern Art (New York), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museu de Arte de S\u00e3o Paulo, Centre Pompidou (Paris), Jeu de Paume (Paris), and Times Art Center Berlin. She has participated in international biennials and triennials including Liverpool Biennial, FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art, Biennial SESC_Videobrasil (S\u00e3o Paulo), Videonale (Bonn), and Sharjah Biennial. In 2024, she was awarded both the AWARE Prize for mid-career artists and the Ulrike Crespo After Nature Award. She is currently developing a feature-length film on the history of the coca plant, extending over a decade of research between the Colombian Amazon, the United States, and Europe.

ACCESSIBILITY

<\/strong>Conversations at the Edge events have live captions (CART). The Gene Siskel Film Center is fully ADA accessible and its theaters are equipped with hearing loops.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Colombian French artist and filmmaker Laura Huertas Mill\u00e1n has earned international acclaim for films as visually rich as they are thought-provoking, weaving together documentary, ethnography, and speculative fiction. Over the past decade, she has focused her practice on the coca plant, using it as a lens to reframe colonial legacies, Indigenous knowledge systems, and the […]<\/p>\n

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