11.12.25, 19:00, Laura Huertas Millán, Archivo Fantasma — Spectral Fictions

Archivo Fantasma — Spectral Fictions presents different cinematic approaches and strategies of counter — and alter — narratives to address official archives and records that Laura Huertas Millán’s practice engages with. It posits fiction as a critical and emancipatory strategy for engaging with colonial violence, institutional silences, historical erasures, and the ideological construction of collective memory. This artistic practice draws from Latin American traditions of meta-fiction and epistemic disobedience, emphasizing how historical records are shaped by regimes of truth that legitimize certain epistemologies while excluding others. This talk will present her critical series on “ethnographic fictions”, and a recent investigation inspired by Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation”, a history “written with and against the archive” to articulate how fiction can serve as a reparative method, to address not only the documents of the past but also the languages shaping our present and future.

Laura Huertas Millan is a Colombian and French artist and filmmaker based in Brussels, Belgium. Selected in major cinema festivals such as the Berlinale, Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), Rotterdam International Film Festival, New York Film Festival and Cinéma du Réel, her films have been awarded at the Locarno Film Festival, FIDMarseille, Doclisboa and Videobrasil, among others. More than twenty retrospectives and focuses on her work have been organized internationally, in cinematheques (Toronto ́s TIFF Lightbox, Harvard ́s Film Archive, Bogota ́s cinematheque, Austrian Film Museum, Tabakalera); museums (CA2M, CCA Glasgow, OCA Norway); film festivals (Mar del Plata, Rencontres du Documentaire de Montréal, FICUNAM, Curtocircuito); and non-fiction seminars (The Flaherty seminar, DocsKingdom). Her films have been featured in solo exhibitions at the MASP Sao Paulo, Maison des Arts de Malakoff and Medellin ́s Modern Art Museum; in biennials such as the Liverpool Biennial, FRONT Triennial, Videonnale and ScreenCity Biennial; and screenings in museums such as the Centre Pompidou, the Jeu de Paume, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Her work is part of private and public collections such as KADIST, CNAP, Banco de la República de Colombia, CIFO Miami, and FRAC Lorraine. Since 2019, she is part of the curatorial and research collective Counter Encounters, which has developed projects at the Centre Pompidou and Tate Modern.