Zoom Talk - Seeing Being Seen: Territories, Frontiers, Circulations
Thursday, October 1st, 6pm GMT
Talk with Laura Huertas Millán about her film La Libertad (2017)
Location: Zoom, hosted by Hangar - Centro de Investigação Artística
La Libertad will be available at https://hangar.com.pt/online/ from October 1st to 4th.
To participate in the talk please send an email to register: hangarcia.production@gmail.com.
Live streaming will be available on Facebook.
*** Facebook event and more information:
https://www.facebook.com/events/2449694915323508
https://hangar.com.pt/online/talk-seeing-being-seen-territories-frontier...
About the programme Seeing Being Seen: Territories, Frontiers, Circulations, curated by Raquel Schefer
The gaze and its processes of rotation and retroactivity are central to the philosophical and epistemological reflection of the 20th and early 21st centuries. From Merleau Ponty’s phenomenology of perception to Viveiros de Castro’s Amerindian perspectivism, passing by Sartre’s phenomenological descriptions, the thinking of the perceptive and cognitive models is combined with a reflection on the relationships between the subject/observer and the object/observed. The possibility arises of overcoming the conventional binary framework of the modern hegemonic visual and epistemological formations.
Seeing Being Seen: Territories, Frontiers, Circulations assembles works directed by Latin American women filmmakers in which the dynamic notions of “territory” and “border”–and the implicit principle of circulation–are approached through a system of gaze’s mobility and retroactivity. This system calls into question the dual and hierarchical relationships between the observer/observed, the subject/object, and the human/non–human categories structuring the dominant epistemic and representative model. Through experimental film forms, the works present sensory situations in which the observer is tacitly exposed to the gaze of the observed, “seeing being seen” processes and co-presence experiences close to a model of co-representation exceeding the subject/object seemingly stable opposition. Processes of activation, agency, and circulation of perspectives (human and non-human, machinic, animal, vegetable, mineral) are central to the films of the programme. They all overcome the colonial representations of landscape, nature and the human figure in a framework of reciprocity and de-anthropo-centralization, a fundamental issue in a period of imminent ecological catastrophe and threat to the Amerindian peoples.
still do video La libertad
About Laura Huertas Millán’s La Libertad (2017, 29’, Colombia, France, USA)
Matriarchies have assembled around the backstrap loom, a weaving Pre-Hispanic technique preserved for centuries by indigenous women in Mesoamerica. La Libertad unfolds like a weaving of figures and gestures constituting this labour, circulating between a domestic space, an archeology museum and a cooperative. Various communities and ecologies entwine around handicraft — tracing, echoing, articulating, expanding liberty.
Laura Huertas Millán’s biography
Laura Huertas Millán is a French-Colombian filmmaker and visual artist, whose practise stands at the intersection between cinema, contemporary art and research.
Selected in 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 earn prizes at the Locarno Film Festival, FIDMarseille, Doclisboa and Videobrasil, among others. More than twenty retrospectives and focus of her work have been organised around the globe, in cinematheques such as Toronto ́s TIFF Lightbox, Harvard’s Film Archive or Bogota’s cinematheque, and leading film festivals as Mar del Plata and Rencontres du Documentaire de Montreal.
In the art field, her latest solo exhibitions were held at the MASP Sao Paulo, Maison des Arts de Malakoff and Medellin’s Modern Art Museum. Her films have also been exhibited and screened in art institutions (Centre Pompidou Paris, Jeu de Paume, Guggenheim Museum NY, Times Art Berlin) and biennials (Liverpool, FRONT Triennial, Videobrasil, Videonnale). They are part of private and public collections (Kadist, CNAP, Banco de la República de Colombia, CIFO, FRAC Lorraine, and others).
Huertas Millán holds a practise-based PhD on “Ethnographic Fictions” developed between PSL University (SACRe program) and the Sensory Ethnography Lab (Harvard University). She works as an educator in academic and alternative spaces. Since 2019, Huertas Millán is part of a research-based duo with curator and writer Rachael Rakes on critical anthropology and the aesthetics and politics of the encounter.
Raquel Schefer’s biography
Raquel Schefer is a researcher, a filmmaker, a film curator, and a lecturer at Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3 University. She holds a PhD. in Film and Audiovisual Studies from Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3 University, a Master in Documentary Cinema from the University of Cinema of Buenos Aires, and a degree in Communication Sciences from the New University of Lisbon. She published the book Self-Portrait in Documentary in 2008, in Argentina, as well as several book chapters and articles in Portugal and abroad. She has taught at Grenoble Alpes University, Paris Est University, Rennes 2 University, the University of Cinema of Buenos Aires, and the University of Communication in Mexico City. She was a Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is currently a post-doctoral FCT fellow at the CEC/University of Lisbon and the University of the Western Cape, and a co-editor of the quarterly of theory and history of cinema La Furia Umana.
