Laura Huertas Millán’s Exhibition Curanderxs at C/O Berlin [until 22.01.2025] revolves around the complex history and misunderstood legacy of the coca plant, which originates in the Andean region of South America. While widely recognized for its association with cocaine production and culturally popularised through narratives like the Netflix-Production Narcos, the coca plant’s story goes way deeper. With a history spanning over 8,000 years, coca has been central to the lives, spirituality, and survival of many Indigenous communities across South America. Huertas Millán’s exhibition unearths these layers, revealing the plant’s healing abilities and highlighting its violent entanglement with colonialism and the war on drugs. Through her lens, Huertas Millán invites viewers to reconsider the coca plant beyond its criminalised status and to recognize its true cultural and historical significance.
Hey Laura, excited to talk to you. How would you introduce yourself and your work?
Hi Amany! My name is Laura Huertas Millan, I am a visual artist and filmmaker originally from Colombia, based in Europe for more than twenty years. My moving image practice navigates between cinema and contemporary art, writing, research, and pedagogy. I am interested in exploring how we tell stories, how the narratives of living together are being built, and in what ways they are destroying the very same space of commonness. I’m drawn to in-between positions, diasporic trajectories, ecologies, and history. I reflect upon the language that has been used to speak about marginalised beings and communities. My attachment to Colombia, my family, language and culture, has led me to stay connected and work between the Americas and Brussels where I’m based at the moment.
In your exhibition “Curanderxs” which is currently displayed at C/O Berlin, you explore the topic of the coca plant and its complex history which is deeply embedded in the life of native communities and their practices and marked by violence through colonialism and the war on drugs etc. Can you walk us through the concept of exhibition and your three video installations?
This exhibition presents three works around the coca plant, which I have been investigating for more than ten years. In the first room you see El Laberinto, which evokes the arrival of cocaine to the Colombian Amazon, the impact it had on native communities, and the massacres that follow, through the voice of one survivor of that time, Cristóbal Gomez Abel. It also draws a parallel between oil and natural resources extraction and the cocaine industry.
The second room features a three channel installation: Curanderxs, inspired by Peruvian and Colombian Inquisition archives, in which several women were condemned due to clandestine coca plant distribution, after the prohibition that Spaniards imposed in the 17th century. Some of these women had spiritual and political practices with the plant and they got punished for witchery, for not conforming to the colonial and patriarchal system, or for not staying within their caste. The Inquisition archives, although verbose, are silent and silencing, written within a colonial and catholic language in which accused people had to confess, to alleviate a sentence already known before the trial itself. The absence of the accused voices, palpable during the research, led to the writing of a fiction silent film, to point to these archive’s forms of censorship and negative spaces. Curanderxs then became an immersive and expressionist piece, a speculative fake early cinema archive, telling the story of a group of femmes who disseminate the coca plant and come back as spectres to haunt our present.
The third piece, Para La Coca is – just like the first film – part of my long term research in the Colombian Amazon around the multiple uses of the coca plant. It is based on the ongoing conversation with Cristobal Gómez Abel, about the traditional uses of the coca plant within his family and community (Muina and Murui) and the “myth of origin” of the plant, which is akin to a law. This myth pertains to the plant as a person, a woman and a kin who teaches us non violent practices and ethics. The plant operates through a symbiosis with the body of the mambero, the one who does mambe, who ingests the ancestral green coca powder elaborated and consumed in the community.
The version of Para la Coca that we see in the show is built on an ongoing conversation around indigenous protocols with Cristóbal and Nelly Kuiru (Murui), a filmmaker and community activist whom I admire, who created a native audiovisual archive and film school in the Colombian Amazon. Her appointment as an advisor for this piece helped me understand and articulate the role that I could play as a foreign person to the Murui’s people, while part of the same nation-state and directly concerned by the war on drugs: to support and to advocate for the decriminalisation and un-demonization of the coca plant, while addressing an international audience. Naturally this work closes the exhibition, as an invitation for viewers to digest all these works, and to help us propagate that message.
The colour green seems to play an important role in your exhibition. Can you tell us a little bit more about its significance?
The green curtains invoke a specific green, Scheele’s green, invented at the end of the 19th century by the scientist Carl Wilhelm Scheele. It contained arsenic, and several people working with that particular shade were poisoned. In theatre it is bad luck to wear green on stage — this is where that comes from. Scheele’s green resonates with the history of cocaine, responding to the illusion of scientific “progress” through chemistry, and the consequences of that extraction. “Nature” is a colonial construction with its own toxicity, rooted in the ontological division between nature and culture, which is a fallacy in the first place. The colour green contains for me so many of these colonial vestiges: think about military camouflages, about the history of landscape painting and its relationship to land domination, about “greenwashing”, and Scheele’s green is one of these many stories. The show is bathed in this vivid green light.
The title of the exhibition is “Curanderxs” [English: healers], why did you choose that name and what does it stand for?
It translates to “healers” but it is the gender neutral version, in Spanish. The title is inspired by the notion of pharmakon, an entity that can be both a poison and a remedy, which is adamant to think about psychotropic plants. The coca plant has been stigmatised in modern history because of the historic building up towards the current war on drugs and all the politics around cocaine, which was invented in Europe as a direct consequence of the colonial extraction of the plant from the Americas. Many people don’t even know that the coca plant is separated from what is known today as cocaine (a compound of many industrial materials), or that the coca is a medicinal plant, still used in pharmaceutics today, defended and protected by many Andean native nations.
I am also reflecting upon how gendered violence intersected with the criminalization of the plant and the eradication of nature, with the genocide of indigenous existences, knowledges, traditions and economies. As many thinkers and artists have addressed before me, the construction of gender in Latin America is linked to colonialism: how many genders were there before that and why societies still comply with the fallacy of gender binary and heteronormativity? How was this imposed?
I’m trying to imagine a fiction story where these questions can be reunited, with a form of writing that gathers and not separates, or categorises, in taxonomic ways. I’m imagining a group of femmes, of mestizas, who distributed but also embodied the coca plant, in multiplicity, plurality, polyphony — healers in a non missionary or white-saviorist way. In fact in Colombia, when you call someone a “curandero” it means that the medicine that this person uses is not legitimised by a western scientific institution, it is a denigrating word actually, classist and eurocentric. Similarly, gender inclusive language (as the x in Curanderxs) tends to be demonised by conservatives in Colombia and beyond. By reclaiming a word that could be an insult as a potential for existence and for exiting coloniality, these fictional characters find a form of collectivity, of political action and freedom, even beyond their physical deaths.
Your movies are very raw, intimate and quite an immersive experience. How do you achieve this? What is your approach?
Each one of the pieces has a different strategy, but intimacy is definitely important in my work because I have been researching and thinking about the role that cameras play in dehumanising people. The colonial gaze has been one of the reasons why I became a filmmaker in the first place, to respond to that or to propose a counter-representation. I needed stories and representations closer to the complexity of human existence and interpersonal relationships, rehumanizing cinema, rewilding it, or repurposing it. I do look for immersion, proximity, connection, sharing emotional spaces, and most of all for liveness when recording, which is achieved through a mix of intense planning, rehearsing, choreography, documentation, and improvisation. Intimacy is a horizon that I look forward to when working, but not a given, not an obligation, and not an imposition on anyone. It just takes a lot of time. It requires slow production, limiting the number of projects that I develop, and engaging in long-term meaningful experiences and dialogues.
You have been doing fieldwork in the Amazon forest for years and your work falls under the umbrella of “ethnofiction”, right? Can you tell us a little bit more about this experience and how it shaped your artistic vision and approach?
When I started making films I had issues with the images of anthropology and how different people from the so-called Souths were represented throughout its history as inferior “others” — Walter Mignolo calls it “the colonial wound”. There was evidence to prove that ethnography and anthropology started as colonial fictions, and that these sciences and disciplines should be read through that lense.
Then I started doing a practice-based PhD around “ethnographic fictions” and spent some time in a laboratory of experimental ethnography and in Colombia with anthropologists. I realised that, especially within the anthropology that is grounded in the Global South, fiction is used to shake the discipline and allow forms of anti-colonial practices. Interested by these ambivalences and paradoxes of both fiction and ethnography, I continued my hybrid filmmaking practice, developing my voice in between documentary practices, experimental cinema and narrative film.
Today I am more unapologetically into fiction, or contemporary creative writing practices, that are uncategorizable, hybrid, intertextual but keep imagination and criticality as guiding principles.
You already talked about how othering is a problem in Anthropology. How do you as a researcher go about entering spaces, especially indigenous and marginalised communities, exploring their existence in your art while still acknowledging your own position and the privilege that comes with it?
The question of how Cinema is an extractivist medium or force is at the core of this particular exhibition. I am not sure if it comes across in a literal way but it definitely informed the way I was trying to write the different chronology of pieces within the exhibition, and the relationship you will have with the images as a viewer. The first piece “El Laberinto” is a response to ethnographic film and what it meant to have access to Cristobal Gómez Abel’s testimony, since he witnessed the impact and violence on indigenous nations of the arrival of drug lords and their thanatocracy methods. How is it possible to address and to represent that history without falling into the colonial, so often intrusive or victimising traps of ethnography? I was looking for formal strategies to honour the subjective process that comes into the memory path of transmitting this history. Altered states, dreams and fragmentations follow the complexity of a memory process and reckoning.
Curanderxs thinks through the history of mine extraction and how many women evoked by the archives were involved in distributing the plant in silver mines in Peru. How the coca plant was essential for indigenous workers enslaved by Europeans to survive. Analogue film has silver on it, so it is directly linked to mines and these extractive apparatuses. Analog film is a material that I am addressing critically, in all these works. I don’t fetishise it, but use it to point to the legacy of its visualities. It is a material that I upcycle, reuse, destroy through found footage and experimentation, or mock through trompe l’oeils. I also acknowledge its chemical beauty and potential, but I don’t limit its materiality to that.
“Para La Coca” comes from a very long collaboration with Cristobal Gómez Abel who I met in 2011 and had worked with since. When I first started working with him I was more like a documentary filmmaker coming to a place and making a film about someone. With time the dialogue asked me to push the limits of representation to change the infrastructure that made this footage possible. I started working with Nelly Kuiru as mentioned before. Learning from that experience, I created my own audiovisual production company six months ago, bruja films, and some of the pieces that you saw in the exhibition are produced by this structure in the making. I am thinking about this company as experimental design, where I am imagining an infrastructure where we can think through the inequalities embedded into film and art making, and propose some changes.
When looking at your previous work, which one feels the dearest to your heart and why?
I am very grateful for my older films and the fact that I am still being contacted to speak about it after ten years of having premiered a film but it is true that the new work pieces are very dear to me and my heart because I don’t take it for granted that we are able to make films. It is not a given, it takes a lot of effort and many people are necessary in the process. So whenever I feel like I have the material and funding and support to continue I feel extremely grateful.
What’s coming up next for you?
Right now I am preparing my first feature film which will be a continuation of works around the coca plant. It is going to be a hybrid film intertwining the footage that I have been recording in the Colombian Amazon and also this fictional approach to stories that have been erased or disappeared.
