Drawing from the fields of ethnography, literature, and ecology, Laura Huertas Millán bridges the visual arts, cinema, and decolonial research.
Curanderxs (Spanish term meaning “healers”) is an experimental fiction inspired by documents from the Spanish Inquisition in the Americas. Set in the seventeenth century, this installation tells the story of a group of women persecuted by that religious institution because they distributed coca leaves among the Indigenous workers enslaved in the Potosí mine.
The colonial archives that inspired this work are fragmented and written from the inquisitors’ point of view. To address their silences and lack of detail, Curanderxs draws on the notion of critical fabulation—a concept dear to historian Saidiya Hartman—and employs fictional tools borrowed from early silent cinema. Curanderxs presents itself as a fictional archive, one that points to the erasure of voices and practices revolving around the coca plant.
By creatively reimagining suppressed histories, Curanderxs presents art as a means of resurrecting the past into the present, and thereby acting upon the future.
