Disappearing Operations
Le Journal des Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, cahier A, 2017/2018
In “Disappearing Operations,” Laura Huertas Millán reflects on her family’s intergenerational traumas in Colombia before her departure, connecting her childhood memories of electricity rationing in Bogotá with her reading of Paul Virilio's text “The Aesthetics of Disappearance.” Virilio’s work delves into the impact of technological advancements on memory and bodily experience. Laura Huertas Millán intertwines this reflection with the creation of her alter ego, Arturo Lucia, and the historical figure of Catalina de Erauso to challenge gender stereotypes.
« The evenings immersed in the shadow of my childhood have indelibly etched memories in my mind of places and people illuminated by candlelight and impromptu family activities. Moments of play in the chiaroscuro. Shadow theaters, oral narratives were born, while others were unearthed from the depths of adult memories. »
The Obsidian King
Written by Arturo Lucía, a transvestite alter ego invented by Laura Huertas Millán.
Commissioned by Raimundas Malasauskas, under the name Edward & Otto Pfaff, for Spike Art Quaterly, issue #50 WINTER 2017.
Order here
“It was the day of Lilly Wachowski’s coming out. We sat at this very same table, ready for the morning to unfold, opening the daily sendings with small talk smoothly installing itself as a third in our company, or maybe a pet. Somehow our verbal articulation wasn’t as fluid as it tends to be, while we incessantly repeated the very same gestures we’ve had since childhood, going through their declensions like painters in search of the primal sweep of the brush. We were wondering about Lilly and the mirroring of our story in that of the illustrious Wachowski sisters, and what it would be like if one of us became more of the other.”
Celestial Bodies
Published in Terremoto Magazine, Issue 5 : Todas las Fiestas del Ayer, February 29, 2016
Laura Huertas Millán examines Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán’s enquiry into the inscription of political history in nature within his recent film productions.
“This cosmic vertigo of origin and end, from cosmos to skull, leads to thoughts of melancholic iconography. Melancholia, a Latin term derived from the Greek μελαγχολια (literally, “black bile”) is one of the four humors that, according to Hippocrates, inhabit the human body. Subjects in whom that humor predominates are (more) given to states of affliction and despondency. A cosmic sadness later characterized as the “Saturnine nature,” Durer portrays it in his 1514 engraving Melancholia I, from the Meisterstiche prints series, as a meditating and vexed winged figure. Spread all around are (among other items) geometric instruments of measure and tools for astronomical studies. Far off, a star illumines the sky and a rainbow frames a beyond that in the engraving appears unreachable and regulates the image’s entire composition.”
La Libertad / Freedom
Firstly published in Videobrasil´s IN RESIDENCE blog, May 2016.
Notes from La Libertad´s production journal.
It was surprising that, from the first moments, our mutual exchange gravitated toward a very specific topic: “Freedom”. A word that, as Valery describes, “sings more than it speaks,” a sensitive field prone to sentimentalism and archetypes. When talking about freedom in weaving, Crispina says,
"Weaving is not an employment. It is part of one’s life. As I have been living it, I have it as a part of my life. At home, when weaving, it’s the quietest moments, and one is fully entertained, even forgetting the day and the hour. (…) Someone told me once that I like to do it, that’s why I think in this way. Well, yes, I really like it, because no one is commanding me, but I’m doing it like this, free.”
Quiero un presidente
?, ?, ?
" Quiero un presidente" by Laura Huertas Millán is a reenactment-poem of the piece "I want a president" written by the artist Zoe Leonard in 1992 in response to the candidacy of poet Eileen Myles alongside George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Ross Perot. It was read as part of public collective actions in Bogotá in the run-up to the presidential election in 2018.
“I want an Indigenous woman to be elected as president, elected with an absolute majority of votes in the first round, so as not to confront voters incapable of envisioning a society based on life and the common good. I want my president to ban fracking and allow free access to abortion.”
Missing Mythologies
Cahiers du post-diplôme Document et art contemporain, ÉESI, 2013
Laura Huertas Millán's text "Missing Mythologies," featured in the Cahiers du post-diplôme Document et Art contemporain, explores the birth of Colombian independence and the Western imitation in shaping a national identity. Millán traces her films' foundational inspirations, from Oswald de Andrade's anthropophagic manifesto to Nelson Pereira Dos Santos' cinema, both pivotal in transforming the portrayal of indigenous communities and debunking colonial narratives.
"It was Simón Bolívar who gave his name to the newly liberated nation, with its first constitution in 1821. The new homeland was called 'Gran Colombia' and it linked us to Venezuela, Ecuador, Panama, later to parts of Brazil, Peru, and Nicaragua. 'Gran Colombia' was a utopia, a continental country that would replace Spain's fragmented colonies to give rise to a single independent South American state, no longer under the 'possession' of another. This dream lasted for ten years before being dissolved by further fragmentations.
Today, in downtown Bogotá, at the feet of the 'Torres del Parque', you can still find the 'Park of Independence'. In 1910, to commemorate the centenary of the 'cry for independence', the original woodland (bearing the name 'Wood of Independence') was cleared to make way for the park. Pavilions were built for the exhibition of national products, following the model of pavilions from the world and universal exhibitions, popular in Europe and the United States at that time."
Histoire d’un vampire
Cahiers du post-diplôme Document et art contemporain, ÉESI, 2013
In 'Histoire d’un vampire' (Cahiers du post-diplôme Document et Art contemporain), Laura Huertas Millán delves into the impact of cultural objects on the identity of Colombian writer Gloria Azcárate during her early 2000s expatriation in France, as well as her intimate relationship with annotated books, by evoking Francis F. Coppola's Dracula figure, who, upon arriving in London, needs to sleep in a coffin filled with his native soil to survive.
