The piece I chose was the film playing in the Southern half of the High Line. It’s actually two films by Laura Huertas Millán titled The Anaconda River where from noon-10pm the films are shown to the public. During the trip, I wasn’t able to stand and watch them as we were under a time constraint, but the description was enough to pique my interest. There, in an empty corridor of the High Line, a series of visuals haunt the atmosphere. The films, Aequador (2012) and The Labyrinth (2018), center around Latin American ideas of utopia and rewritten history as a tool for social commentary regarding the native-futurism and colonialism.
I tried watching the films at home, but it seems as though only snippets are publicly available online, making the screenings at the High Line that much more coveted. Regarding replication, new advances in Artificial Intelligence suggest that film can be replicated much more easily than before. But when taking a closer look, these films aren’t only original, they carry a weight only a human with lived experiences can convey. That, coupled with the screenings at the High Line makes for an irreplaceable experience. Not only is the art itself irreproducible, but the feeling of standing on the High Line on a warm summer day with the breeze drifting by you and occasionally cooling you down as you stand and watch these films about Latin life is a feeling you can’t even reproduce if you go again on another day. Given that it is a film being projected onto a wall, I can’t even imagine the experience when the sun goes down and the visuals can shine in their full glory.
Yet, it makes me question John Berger’s arguments regarding the camera and how its introduction transformed narratives combined with visuals into a distinct art form. The images from the film aren’t original, they’re technically reproductions–––captured by the camera and displayed to the viewer through a fixed narrative. If seen without the context, passersby might see them and think they’re just displays of nature. That’s where Berger’s argument comes into play. Millán’s display of these visuals along with the narrative allows for the art to take shape. What could simply be a video transforms into a commentary on the lived experiences of Latin American people and what could’ve been if Native civilizations were left alone to flourish.
