The Anaconda River

Laura Huertas Millán's films fluidly blend traditional documentary footage with elements of science fiction, surrealism, and fantasy. Her work is often developed over an extended period of time, and produced as serial modules. Huertas Millán's practice is anchored by an effort to deconstruct official histories and the colonial roots of anthropology through a hybrid narrative form she coined "ethnographic fiction." By altering and appropriating historical accounts, colonial archives, and genre tropes, she presents alternative stories of political resistance and generational trauma. For her High Line Channel exhibition, Huertas Millán presents two video works, _Aequador_ (2012) and _The Labyrinth_ (2018). Rooted in the haunting landscape of the Colombian Amazon, both works explore the historical colonization of nature and the psychological scars of exploitation. _Aequador_ traces a journey upstream in an alternate reality, seemingly parallel to our present. Abandoned futuristic structures dot the terrain like ancient ruins, looming over locals canoeing along the river. Huertas Millán reimagines the rainforest as an ambiguous space, blending past, present, and futuristic fantasy to critique both foreign and internal colonialism. In doing so, she conjures the ghosts of failed Latin American utopias, and illustrates the absurdity and grandiosity of the imposition of modernism in the region. _The Labyrinth_ offers a psychological and historical descent into the memories of Cristóbal Gómez Abel, a witness to the drug cartels that operated in the Amazon during the 1980s. Following his path between the dense forest and the spectacular, decaying ruins of a narco-mansion—modeled after the Carrington estate from the American soap opera, _Dynasty_—the film is a hallucinatory account of Gómez's near-death experience. Huertas Millán draws a powerful parallel between the violence of 20th-century narcocapitalism and the violence of European colonial conquest, ultimately highlighting the enduring strength of precolonial relationships to the land and the possibilities for Indigenous resistance.