Laura Huertas Millán is an artist and filmmaker, whose work stands at the intersection between cinema, and contemporary art. Entwining experimental ethnography, ecological and decolonial thinking, historical long-term enquiries, and fiction, her moving image work engages with strategies of resistance and survival.
Inspired by forms of anti/alter ethnography and decolonial thinking, Laura Huertas Millán developed between 2009 and 2018 two series of films around the notions of "exoticism" and "ethnographic fiction". Her lecture comes back to the origins of these works and presents the premise around the latter notion: on the one hand, if one considers ethnography as an ensemble of narratives rooted in colonialism, it might be understandable as a form of fabulation. On the other hand, some of the most interesting contemporary practices of ethnography have embraced a de-colonial turn, sometimes by integrating the fictional language tools within their own elaboration. Navigating this contradiction, her film practice of the past years unfolds through portraits of people and places where storytelling takes diverse shapes, creating a cinema of psychotropic potentialities.
The lecture will be held in English language.