Amazon Lab Spring Reception and Event with Filmmaker Laura Huertas Millán

2020 Campus Drive,Durham NC 27708

03 March, 2022

Description

Reception with food and drinks, a screening of three short films by Laura Huertas Millán, and a panel discussion with the filmmaker. Join us for a spring reception celebrating the Amazon Lab’s first year at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute. Due to the limitations imposed by the pandemic, this will be our first event with food and drinks. We will make up for the lost time and share the Lab’s ongoing activities and future plans. Following the reception, there will be a screening of three short films by Laura Huertas Millán and a panel discussion with the filmmaker. Laura Huertas Millan is a French-Colombian filmmaker and visual artist. Her award-winning work combines ethnography, ecology, fiction and historical enquiries. Her work also engages with strategies of survival, resistance and resilience against violence. Sensuous and immersive, her films propose embodied and emotional experiences where aesthetics and politics are indissociable. Panelists: Laura Huertas, Christine Folch (Anthropology - Duke), Gustavo Furtado (Romance Studies - Duke) Program 5:30 - Reception with dinner and drinks at The Ruby (outdoor courtyard in back) 7:00 - Screening of three short films (descriptions below) 8:15 - Panel discussion and Q&A with Laura Huertas Millán Journey to a Land Otherwise Known (2012, 23 minutes) Drawing on the diaries of Bernal Diaz del Castillo, Hans Staden, Jean de Léry, Charles de la Condamine and others, this film reflects on the imaginary of first European contacts with exotic places and people in the tropics. The film’s narration is accompanied by images shot at the Tropical Greenhouse of Lille, a building constructed in 1970 by Jean-Pierre Secq. El laberinto (The Labyrinth, 2018, 21 minutes) El laberinto follows the labyrinthine memories of the film narrator who was involved in the spectacular rise and fall of drug lords in the Colombian Amazon. Jiíbie (2019, 24 minutes) The elaboration ritual of a green coca powder (called mambe or Jíibie) unveils an ancestral myth of kinship. In the Muina-Muruí Amazonian community the coca plant is not a product, but a sacred interlocutor, the beating heart of a collective body Sponsors: Amazon Lab at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, Department of Romance Studies, Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and the Cinematic Arts Program The Amazon Lab engages in projects that foreground the region’s remarkable heterogeneity. The lab will be a space for experimenting with a new paradigm for studying the Amazon through the interdisciplinary field of the environmental humanities, incorporating a number of humanistic and scientific disciplines as well as Indigenous modes of knowledge.