in person || Spotlight: Laura Huertas Millán - Image Policies

It must be possible to tell history differently. This premise could be read as a guiding principle in the work of Laura Huertas Millán. The Columbian-born artist studied at Studio Le Fresnoy and the École des Beaux Arts in Paris before participating from 2014 to 2017 in the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab, founded by Lucien Castaing-Taylor, whose focus is on non-discursive forms for experimental ethnography. "Ethnographic Fiction" is the term Huertas Millán chooses for her working practice, placing exoticism, ethnography, and anthropology in a dynamic interrelation. Her films can be read as multifaceted challenges to question or readjust conventional patterns of observation. (Dietmar Schwärzler)

Program 1
AEQUADOR, 2012, 19 min
BLACK SUN, 2016, 43 min
THE LABYRINTH, 2018, 21 min.

How does architecture inscribe itself into a landscape and what is its relationship to its inhabitants? This question is explored in both Aequador and The Labyrinth, both set in the Colombian Amazon. While Aequador evokes colonial history in the forests of Latin America by means of modernist buildings which transforms it into a science fiction setting, The Labyrinth focuses on the ruins of the villa of Colombian drug lord Evaristo Porras, which is an exact imitation of the Carringtons' "Dynasty" mansion, one of the most famous TV series from the 1980s. Black Sun depicts a conflicted family history and weaves autoethnography with fictionality, in which a suicide attempt by the protagonist sheds new light on intra-family roles. (ds)

Program 2
LA LIBERTAD, 2017, 30 min.
JENY303, 2018, 7 min
JIIBIE, 2019, 24 min

The freedom to determine one's own life away from economic or socio-political constraints, or three portrait films with different focuses. La Libertad takes a look at the activity of weaving in a matriachal society, choreographing the pictorial space and the women acting in it not only by means of the threads of the loom. Jeny is the name of a young Columbian with heroin dependence, 303 is in turn the name of the building of the historically charged architecture faculty at the university in Bogota, which are related in Jeny303. "Jíibie" refers to the green coca powder, and the ritualized production process forms the core of this meta-documentary intervention. (ds)

In cooperation with VIS Vienna Shorts and the Austrian Film Museum.