Curanderxs: Spectral Archives

Join us at e-flux Screening Room on Saturday, October 4, 2025 at 2pm for “Curanderxs: Spectral Archives,” an afternoon with artist and filmmaker Laura Huertas Millán. In dialogue with a new publication on the occasion of the Ulrike Crespo After Nature Prize ’24, Huertas Millán has curated a two-film program featuring Gleidys Salgado and Colectivo Kuchá Suto’s Plan de fuga (2018) and Mercedes Gaviria Jaramillo’s The Calm After the Storm (2020).

The program considers image-making as situated and embodied knowledge—where oral tradition, plant knowledge, and family memory can operate as counter-archives. It will open with an introduction to the framework of Huertas Millán’s book and her most recent moving-image installation, Curanderxs. The screening links Huertas Millán’s decolonial reading of the coca plant to the distinct relationships with archival practices in the two films: a Palenquero community’s fabulated genealogy in Plan de fuga, and a feminist re-reading of national cinema lineage from the personal perspective of one family in The Calm After the Storm. An informal conversation with the artist will follow.

Films

Gleidys Salgado and Kuchá Suto Collective, Plan de fuga(2018, 12 minutes)
Kucha Sutó (“Listen to Us”) Collective is a Colombian audiovisual initiative and collective that aims to preserve the Palenquero language, stories, and cultural heritage of San Basilio de Palenque, the first Maroon town in the Americas. Plan de Fuga, written collectively and directed by Gleidys Salgado, stages a fiction to transmit the memory of the escape that initiated San Basilio and the role of women in it.

Mercedes Gaviria Jaramillo, The Calm After the Storm(Como el cielo después de llover) (2020, 72 minutes)
Mercedes Gaviria Jaramillo turns her return to Medellín as a director’s assistant on her father Víctor Gaviria’s La mujer del animal into a first-person essay on authorship, patriarchy on set, and the politics of home-movie archives. Interweaving family diaries, home movies, an account of the film shooting, and her own writing, the film reckons with legacy and gender, and traces an authorial coming-of-age. Working with, through, and against the cinematic legacy that her family bears, Gaviria Jaramillo offers a haunted yet oblique approach to Colombian cinema history, as she forges her own creative ethos.

Laura Huertas Millán is a Colombian and French artist and filmmaker based in Brussels, Belgium. She approaches cinema as an oneiric, diasporic, and multi-cultural medium. In the past twenty years, she has developed a hybrid practice through historical inquiries and cinematic fabulation, revolving around ecological resistances, the legacies of cultural dissidences in Latin America, and artistic strategies to exit coloniality. Her modular approach to storytelling encompasses film, installations, writing, pedagogy, and expanded media. While grounded in real-life contexts and collaborations, her work reclaims fiction as an emancipatory tool, where altered states build potential sites of healing and commonality, and imagination is the most precious political treasure. 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 been awarded at the Locarno Film Festival, FIDMarseille, Doclisboa and Videobrasil, among others. Recent solo exhibitions include ℅ Berlin, the Crespo Foundation, MASP Sao Paulo, Maison des Arts de Malakoff and Medellin’s Modern Art Museum. She was part of Seoul Mediacity biennial, the Sharjah Biennial, the Liverpool Biennial, FRONT Triennial, Videonnale and ScreenCity Biennial; as well as groups shows at MOMA, LACMA, Banco de la Repùblica de Colombia, among others. In 2024, she was AWARE Nouveau Regard laureate as well as the recipient of the Ulrike Crespo After Nature Prize.

For more information, contact cHJvZ3JhbSB8IGUtZmx1eCAhIGNvbQ==.

Accessibility
– Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
– For elevator access, please RSVP to cHJvZ3JhbSB8IGUtZmx1eCAhIGNvbQ==. The building has a freight elevator nearest to 180 Classon Ave (garage door) leading into the e-flux office space. A ramp is available for steps within the space.
– e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom with no steps between the event space and this bathroom.

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