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La Libertad

Laura Huertas Millán

2017 00:30:00 France, Colombia, MexicoSpanishColorDolby 5.116:9HD video
Tags:
Artist Portraits, Family, Indigenous, Labor, Latino/Chicano

Description

The “greca”, the meander, is the main symbol weaved in the textiles made by the Navarro sisters, from Santo Tomás Jalieza, México. A geometrical form of an endless braid of diamonds, the “greca” represents corn (an entity worshiped by the pre-hispanic civilisations of Mesoamerica). It stands for sustenance, but materialises as well the feminine power of producing abundance and fertility - the textiles displaying this ongoing motives could be read as invocations for life and growth. This is a “greca” film, a meander film, with no beginning nor end, weaving together fragments of daily life.

In the Navarro´s textiles, animals, objects and spaces are represented. Their fabrics are made in the backstrap loom, a prehispanic technique preserved by indigenous women for centuries. Through textiles, women have built the archives of a parallel history of Mexico's crosscultural relationships, "mestizaje", colonialism and modernity. Echoing the politics and ethics represented in the objects they weave, the Navarro have built an ecological and familiar micro society, earning their independence and freedom.


"Produced out of Harvard 's Sensory Ethnography Lab, Laura Huertas Millán 's masterful La Libertad follows a group of matriarchal weavers in Mexico, whose backstrap loom – a pre-Hispanic technique preserved for centuries by Indigenous women in Mesoamerica – provides the formal structure for the film ́s exploration of handicrafts and their ties to freedom. With echoes of the influential ethnographic work of Chick Strand, La Libertad combines astute observation, testimony, subtle transfers in scale, space and texture, as it weaves its own singular study of labour, creativity,and the mysterious traces that circulate between them."

– Andréa Picard

"As if squaring the circle, Huertas Millán implicates her own filmmaking practice within this circuit of women’s creativity. When filming the weaving process, she takes care to describe crisp, minimalist lines and forms in her framing, organizing the thread in the image as if she, too, were “weaving” a piece of visual information. In this way, Millán’s formalism mimics the rigor of her subjects, combining the materialist precision of Liu Jiayin with the tactile, non-intrusive gaze of Bruce Baillie."

– Michael Sicinski

About Laura Huertas Millán

Laura Huertas Millán is a French-Colombian filmmaker and visual artist, whose practice stands at the intersection between cinema, contemporary art, and research.

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 earn prizes at the Locarno Film Festival, FIDMarseille, Doclisboa and Videobrasil, among others. More than twenty retrospectives and focus of her work have been organized around the globe, in cinematheques such as Toronto ́s TIFF Lightbox, Harvard ́s Film Archive or Bogota ́s cinematheque, and leading film festivals as Mar del Plata, Rencontres du Documentaire de Montréal and Thessaloniki Doc.

In the art field, her latest solo exhibitions were held at the MASP Sao Paulo, Maison des Arts de Malakoff and Medellin ́s Modern Art Museum. Her films have also been exhibited and screened in esteemed institutions (Centre Pompidou Paris, Jeu de Paume, Guggenheim Museum NY, Times Art Berlin) and biennials (Liverpool, FRONT Triennial, Videobrasil, Videonnale). They are part of private and public collections (Kadist, CNAP, Banco de la República de Colombia, CIFO, FRAC Lorraine, and others).

Huertas Millán holds a practice-based PhD on « Ethnographic Fictions » developed between PSL University (SACRe program) and the Sensory Ethnography Lab (Harvard University). She works regularly as an educator. Since 2019, Huertas Millán is part of a research-based duo with curator Rachael Rakes on critical anthropology and the aesthetics and politics of the encounter.

About the work:

Laura Huertas Milláńs formally adventurous works entwine ethnography, ecology, fiction and historical investigation. Sensuous and immersive, her films propose embodied and emotional experiences where aesthetics and politics are indissociable. Between 2009-2012, Huertas Millán created a series of works around « exoticism » including Aequador (2011) and Journey to a Land Otherwise Known (2012), where colonial narratives of « othering » and racialised oppression were deconstructed through sci-fi, speculative fiction and lo- fi fantasy.

Afterwards, she established the project « Ethnographic Fictions » which includes the films Sol Negro (2016), La Libertad (2017), and jeny303 (2018). The paradox at the core of this series was that ethnography as an ensemble of narratives rooted in colonialism could be considered as a form of fiction-making. Meanwhile, some of the most interesting attempts at contemporary decolonial practices of ethnography have embraced fictional language tools. Her « Ethnographic Fictions » series reflects upon those ambiguities and complexities inherent to anthropological practices, while building cinematic spaces of their own.

Since 2018, Huertas Millan has been working on the notion of « pharmakon » (an entity both a poison and a healer). More specifically about the coca plant and its non-human subjectivity, its cosmological non-western uses, its role on the war on drugs and psychotropics prohibition. The Labyrinth (2018), Jíibie (2019), and an upcoming feature film are part of this research.