Curanderxs: Spectral Archives

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.

Mercedes Gaviria Jarmillo (Medellín, Colombia) is a sound designer and film director. She graduated with a degree in film directing from the Film University of Buenos Aires (FUC). At the 2018 BAFICI festival, she won the Best Sound award for Albertina Carri's film Las hijas del fuego (Daughters of Fire), and again in 2021 for Lucas Larriera's Canal 54. She has served as sound designer for Carolina Moscoso's Visión Nocturna, winner of FID Marseille 2020, and for Clarisa Navas' Las mil y una. Her debut feature film, Como el cielo después de llover (Like the Sky After the Rain), premiered at Visions du Réel and subsequently screened at the Guanajuato International Film Festival, Documenta Madrid, the Gijón International Film Festival (where it won the Young Critics' Award for Best Film), and the Mar del Plata Film Festival (where it received a special mention from the young critics). In Colombia, it premiered at the Cali International Film Festival, where it won the Best Director award in the national competition. The film also participated in the Rotterdam International Film Festival and the Doc Fortnight International Film Festival at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Currently, Mercedes is pursuing a master's degree in sound art at UNTREF and works as a sound designer at Atalante, a sound studio she co-founded with sound designers Marcos Canosa and Lucas Larriera in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

The Kuchá Suto Collective, a group of storytellers and oral historians, is an initiative for alternative community filmmaking and communication. Founded in 1999 by members of the San Basilio de Palenque community, it is led and composed of residents of this community. Since then, they have developed an integrated strategy for preserving, disseminating, and reconstructing the historical memory and cultural heritage of the region. This strategy incorporates a culturally sensitive approach, including processes for creating spaces for non-formal education in communication, creative expression, and the production of cultural audiovisual content, with the participation of elders, children, and young people from the community. Their projects includes developing communication processes, creating communication content, and providing training in the territories of Afro-Colombian, Black, Afro-Caribbean, and Palenque communities, where they support various initiatives.