Laura Huertas Millán: Pharmakon Ecologies

Laura Huertas Millán, The Labyrinth, 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Video Data Bank.

Join Colombian French artist and filmmaker Laura Huertas Millán for an evening of works reflecting on colonial histories, Indigenous knowledge, and ecological violence.

“Huertas Millán…take[es] viewers along narratives across foliage, time, and space.”—Hoor Al Qasimi and Jiwon Lee, Sharjah Biennial 15: Thinking Historically in the Present

Colombian French artist and filmmaker Laura Huertas Millán 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 pharmakon—a substance that can both poison and cure—her work reflects on the coca leaf’s 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 Cristóbal Gómez Abel—an elder of the Muina Murui communities and former cocaine worker—with 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 Millán and the artist and writer Claire Pentecost, co-founder of the experimental cultural space Watershed Art & Ecology. Presented in partnership with Video Data Bank.

2018–2024, 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
2018, Colombia, France, 21 minutes
In Spanish with English and French subtitles
Winner, Pardo di Domani Best Direction Prize, 2018 Locarno Film Festival
A voyage into the labyrinthine memories of Cristóbal Gómez 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’s mansion—modeled after the Carrington estate from the soap opera Dynasty—as it unravels the hallucinatory narrative of a near-death experience.

Para la Coca
With Cristóbal Gómez Abel, 2023, Colombia, France, 14 minutes
In Spanish with English, French, and Arab subtitles
Para la Coca revisits 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 “right use” of the plant. Created in collaboration with Cristóbal Gómez Abel (Bora/Muina Murui), the film connects this myth to the contemporary ritual use of coca within Colombia’s 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, select clips and documentation
2024, France, Germany, 21 minutes
No dialogue
In this multi-channel installation, Laura Huertas Millán 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 Millán highlights the coca plant’s role in both colonial exploitation and resistance, while drawing a material connection between silver mines—and the silver content of analog film itself.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Laura Huertas Millán is 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 – 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 São 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 (São 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

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. For other accessibility requests, please visit saic.edu/access or write cate@saic.edu.

TICKETS

$13 General public
$8 Students & seniors
$6.50 Film Center members
$5 SAIC staff & faculty & AIC staff
FREE for SAIC students with a valid ID

All CATE programs are free for SAIC students. Unless otherwise noted, SAIC student tickets are released five days prior to showtime. Tickets must be picked up in person from the Gene Siskel Film Center box office. A student ID is required.

RESOURCE GUIDES

Conversations at the Edge’s resource guides contain articles, interviews, and other material related to upcoming artists and events. Available here.