© Jorge das Neves
© Jorge das Neves
© Jorge das Neves
© Jorge das Neves
Laura Huertas Millán
Journey to a Land Otherwise Known, 2011
Video, 2 K, stereo, colour, sound, 23’, loop
Courtesy of the artist
Laura Huertas Millán calls one of her lines of work ‘ethno-fictions’, a process of subversion, deconstruction and reinvention of the colonial gaze and authority. The film featured here belongs to a series on exoticism that the artist started in 2009 based on her experience of the difficulty of integrating in France as an emigrant and on a reflection about the construction of the concept of the exotic ‘other’. Huertas Millán intersects planes from the brutalist building in the Lille botanical garden with a narrative built from the collage of different texts by various European travellers describing their arrival at, and encounter with the new world, offering a glimpse of the perpetuation of the same colonial stereotypes and ideologies across several centuries.