Journey to a Land Otherwise Known

"Journey to a Land Otherwise Known is part of a series initiated in 2009, around the notion of 'exoticism’. The source of the series – which includes Sin Dejar Huella (Without Leaving a Trace) (2009) and Aequador (2012) – lies in a discovery of a book of photographs depicting Mapuche natives in the Jardin du Luxembourg, in Paris, in the early 20th century. The poignant memory of these vanished people, forced into exile and exposed in France, has haunted me for many years.

This work was inspired by the first accounts of the natural and ethnographic explorations in America by Conquistadores, missionaries and scientists. The film is entirely shot in the Tropical Greenhouse of Lille, a building constructed in 1970 by Jean-Pierre Secq, a sort of reinforced concrete botanical Crystal Palace.

The architecture and the plants of this enclosed place are used as narrative supports for an initiatory journey, presenting the speech of an 'explorer' and his visions. The plants materialize traces of the history of this botanical knowledge, made of appropriations, displacements and exiles. As an allegory of the conquest itself, Journey to a Land... ends with the first orange trees (European seeds) planted in America.

The fantastic and onirical side of the film was a way to contradict all rationalistic discourse, even my very own discourse about it. I wanted to highlight the power of hallucination with plants in a literal and figurative sense, by letting strange and unusual images emerge.

Literal and figurative journeys took me to the cinema as a medium but also as a subject. I'm particularly interested in its representation of otherness: ethnological representations, historical archives, the iconography established by the mass cinema. The porosity between documents and representations, short news item and collective history, knowledge and perversity, narration and delirium, is at the heart of my writing.

The film proposes a pastiche of an ethnographical film in an enclosed space, an artificial jungle in an European tropical greenhouse, with a voice over of a white man describing the discovery of the 'other', the 'strange'. By deconstructing the ways of the classical ethnographic films (male voice over, explaining what we see), I wanted to cast doubt on the veracity of the taxonomic discourse used by the Western culture to describe otherness. Journey to a land... evokes the violent origins of the 'New World' and the subsistence of the imagery that it engendered.

When I made Journey to a Land..., the political environment in France (the country where I have been living for 12 years) was becoming more and more aggressive towards foreigners and immigrant people, with new immigration laws, the acceptance of extremisms, and political discourses trivializing xenophobic remarks and attitudes. I recognized the political discourses of that time as a revival of the 'savage' figure. Unfortunately, racism is still an important issue in Western culture nowadays, present in all the wings of the political panorama.

Similarly, in those years, the survivors of kidnappings by the FARC have published books about their captivity in Colombia. The iconographic construction around these facts, in Colombia and France, has marked me. I felt that both cultures were still mired in a colonial discourse, missing a new syntax, and the right words to articulate our current and contemporary dramas, instead of a merely dichotomy between the 'civilized' and the 'savage'."
 

Laura Huertas Millán in a statement to PLATFORM:VB (October 2013)