The artist discusses her notion of exoticness, as featured in her piece Journey to a Land Otherwise Known, which won a prize at the 18th Festival. Shot in a tropical greenhouse in the French city of Lille, the video, according to the artist, positions viewers along two poles: political questioning and sensory, fictitious experience. Closely tied to Europe’s colonial past, these spaces provide the raw material for the artist to discuss different forms of representation of alterity, or of what is considered foreign. They also concern her own personal history as a Colombian-born woman living in France for 12 years. She says that living there, she often sees the same commonplace assumptions contained in old texts by early Western conquistadors in the Americas resurface, revealing the pertinacy of her questioning on the ways we relate to the other in our days.
- More about Laura Huertas Millán in Collection
- Further info on Journey to a Land Otherwise Known in Collection