Laura Huertas Millán & Jean-Louis Tornatore

Jean-Louis Tornatore is an anthropologist and Professor at the University of Bourgogne. He is the author of Pas de transition sans transe. Essai d’écologie politique des savoirs, Bellevaux, Éditions Dehors, October 2023. He is working to deconstruct the category of heritage “before” the Anthropocene. In 2017 he co-initiated a political ecology workshop committed to a critical and speculative approach to transitions. He was a member of the Laboratoire d’anthropologie et d’histoire de l’institution de la culture (IIac/Lahic, Cnrs-Ehess-Ministère de la culture, Paris) and an associate member of Shadyc (Sociologie, histoire et anthropologie des dynamiques culturelles, Cnrs-Ehess, Marseille). Her empirical research focuses on the heritage status of industrial remains, through their conversion into monuments or ‘cultural wastelands’, and on forms of heritage commitment in situations of loss. He recently worked with Perrine Alranq, an actress, clown and researcher (La Fabrique Sauvage), to create L’Occident désorienté, a spectacular show in which an anthropologist and a clown come together to explore the possibility of ‘transforming’ the West.

Laura Huertas Millán is a Franco-Colombian filmmaker and visual artist whose practice lies at the intersection between cinema, contemporary art and research. She is co-director of the Film/Video Chair at Bard College in New York. Her films have won awards at the Locarno Film Festival, FIDMarseille, Doclisboa and Videobrasil, among others. Her most recent solo exhibitions have been at MASP Sao Paulo, Maison des Arts de Malakoff and the Museum of Modern Art in Medellin. Her films have also been exhibited and screened in art institutions (Centre Pompidou Paris, Jeu de Paume, Guggenheim Museum NY). They form part of private and public collections (Kadist, CNAP, Banco de la República de Colombia, CIFO, FRAC Lorraine, etc.). Huertas Millan holds a practical doctorate on ‘Ethnographic Fictions’ developed between PSL University (SACRe programme) and the Sensory Ethnography Lab (Harvard University). Since 2019, she has been part of the curatorial and research collective Counter Encounters, which has developed projects at the Centre Pompidou and Tate Modern.