Para la coca (2023) and other works

Overview

French-Colombian visual artist and filmmaker Laura Huertas Millán’s works reflect the complex realities and ecologies produced by colonial relations in Abya Yala. Aequador (2011) imagines a strikingly uncanny parallel present where the landscape of settler- colonial imaginings exists differently, diverging from linear history. Journey to a Land Otherwise Known (2011–2012) explores the haunted combination of brutalist architecture and imported vegetation at the Plantes equatorial greenhouse in Lille, France. The Labyrinth (2018) and Para la coca (2023), present opposite uses and personhoods of the psychotropic coca plant, entangled in relationships of drug trafficking extractivism and Indigenous epistemological resistance in Colombia.