Ana María Millán’s practice draws links between the politics of animation, digital subcultures, violence, and propaganda. Using the traditional methodologies of role playing, she develops new narratives and soundscapes to create games at the intersection between fiction and criticism that rely on humor, interconnectivity, trust, and chance. As part of TBA21–Academy’s artistic research program, Meandering, Millán was commissioned to develop a live action role-playing game (LARP), a form of gaming where players co-create a fictional narrative represented by real-world environments while interacting with each other in character, for the convening An Ocean Without Shore. Between 8-12 November 2022, the artist worked with local gamers, cultural practitioners, program guests, and TBA21 staff to develop a series of avatars that addressed the experiences of riverscapes and riverbank communities threatened by extractive industries. Departing from the artist’s gaming methodology and pedagogical experiments, the participants were invited to co-create a script for a digital animation that bridges the Colombian Pacific Coast with Andalusia, in the south of Spain, attending to the crossovers between shamanism, colonialism, and digital cultures. Moving through views of dense, dried vegetation, from the mountain paramo to the river basin, Millán combines ecology with political history in a filmic, fictional style, to…

Stream – Ana María Millán. . Esta es la historia de un grupo de animales marinos que escapan de un parque acuático en el que son, de distintas maneras, esclavizados. Los animales atraviesan ductos y rompen una pared que les permite llegar a mar abierto en medio de una tierra estéril y desolada. Es también la historia de una persecución, de un derrame de petróleo en el mar y de la respuesta de una mujer, entrenadora de un tiburón en este mundo marino artificial, que ocupa parte de su tiempo en la militancia activista por la conservación medioambiental. Por último, es la historia del hallazgo de una suerte de mundo prometido, aún floreciente, en los confines de un planeta sin esperanza. Bajo estas historias, más que un guión, se encuentran las posiciones y la capacidad narrativa de un grupo de artistas que, hace poco más de un año, fueron invitados a realizar una expedición marítima de dos semanas alrededor de las Islas Solomon. Esta expedición, propuesta y financiada por una institución austriaca, hace parte de un programa que busca generar pensamiento crítico y activaciones artísticas y políticas en torno al impacto del calentamiento global sobre los océanos del mundo. Millán…

Role-playing and reenactment in the work of Ana Maria Millán. Eugenio Viola . After the novel, and subsequently cinema privileged narrative as the key form of cultural expression of the modern age, the computer age introduces its correlate – database. But it is also appropriate that we would want to develop poetics, aesthetics, and ethics of this database. Lev Manovich(1) . To reflect, analyze and understand the constitutive elements, linguistic structures and expressive forms produced by the pervasiveness of new media means to investigate the very ways of creating, producing, spreading and enjoy- ing knowledge in our “post-global” age. These experiences are profoundly reshaping our aesthetic and epistemological approach to art, which is characterized by an increasingly hybridizing attitude, able to question the fruition and the experience of vision. Today, the relationships between art and the digital discloses territories with potentially unlimited possibilities that are partly still unexpressed: an ecosystem made up of symbioses, grafts, migrations between different languages, and codes. It is not a case that most art today deploys new technology at one if not most stages of its production, dissemination and consumption: multichannel video installations, Photoshopped images, digital prints, cut-and-pasted files are ubiquitous forms. We can count…

— ¿Cómo vamos con las transformaciones? — ¿Las transformaqué? — A ver, cuando una cosa tiene una forma y luego tiene otra, el paso que va de una forma a la otra se llama la transformación. ¿Su trabajo acá no era estar pendiente de las transformaciones? — No, yo no trabajo acá, yo vine fue a acompañar a mi prima. — Volví, prima; hola Aberrael. — Hola Estela. ¿Cómo vamos con las transformaciones? — Las transformaciones ya entraron en la fase recursiva. — Ay prima, ¿re… cur… siva? — Sí prima. Le cuento: una función recursiva es una función aplicada a un resultado previo de la misma función. — Ya. O sea que una transformación recursiva es una transformación de una cosa que es el resultado de otra transformación del mismo tipo. — No pues… acá con las transformaciones no funciona igual porque en realidad no tienen resultados: acá en esta planta siempre interrumpimos la transformación antes de que se termine el paso que lleva de una cosa a la otra. — Ay qué lindo eso prima. Divino. — Más o menos. Entonces acá en la fase recursiva tenemos es transformación de la transformación, y no del resultado. Si tenemos…

Zurück aus dem Reich, welch Glück.    . Frío en Colombia (2015), is a fragmented and tenuous reenactment of a filmic artifact long repressed within the annals of Colombian cinema: Kalt in Kolumbien, a 1985 German-Colombian production that resulted in the deaths of director Dieter Schidor and producer Víctor Nieto Jr., who was also, at the time, the director of the Cartagena Film Festival founded by his father. (1) Shrouded by a legacy of tragedy and shame, the film premiered at the 1985 Toronto Film Festival and was screened the following year at the Berlinale, but was eventually banished by a Kafkaesque German bureaucracy to an archive in Hamburg where to this day it remains legally trapped awaiting a postmortem authorization for its distribution. The only available copy is a heavily deteriorated videotape retained by Marcel Odenbach—a pioneering German video artist who portrayed a fictionalized version of himself in the film—and digitalized by Ana María Millán to serve as the primary source material for her adaptation. It is then almost impossible to determine the aesthetic merit of the original, which looks like a weird mixture between a shoddy low-budget B movie and experimental 1970s video art, although such an assessment is…

Lost Souls “The world is Beautiful. And that is very sad.” Stanilslaw Jerzy Lec . The landscape darken, there is fog, only the sound of some ravens cawing remains in the atmosphere. On the background, one or two storms; the black t-shirts, the black trainers, the black mouths, the black nails, black jeans, the black ice, other black textures; all clothes smell of death because they were buried weeks before and unearth the day of the show. There is such drama, such theatricality, that it is almost impossible not to feel that one is burned inside by tenderness. Because when the sinister and the obscure exceed their means, they become amusing messengers of innocence. All of that that appears so macabre and so sordid also reminds a certain infantile primary fear. Fear of the forest and its creatures, the landscape that is no more the city, that is endless hence not measurable generate in us, urban inhabitants, an adolescent attraction. We go every now and then with our tents and torches and play to survive in the night, feel scared of slight noises we no longer understand, of insects and promises of a wild life. We are not prepared for…

Dinasty The representations of the tropics or territitories defined by global imaginaries such as exotic, are a common theme in Ana Maria Millan’s work, who uses as reference audiovisual and cinematographic discourses that belong to mass culture to comment and different scenarios of colonialization and also to revert those uses of otherness made by hegemonic cultures. Inside fictions of mass consumerism such as cinema, it is common to depict tropical landscape inspired on notions that have been received from colonial times and that have straight connectiosn with christian mithology. The tropical, the jungle, the uncknown and in this series more preciselly we see how the new territories were identified with the notion of hell received from the jew christian tradi- tion.The heat, the noises, the diversity and monstruocity of species bring a perverse attention to a world where traditional and civilized laws do not apply. A space where otherness rules and there is an anarchy difficult to understand for eurocentric cultures. Western history has created a savage tropic in which the white civilian has perished in its constant and anxious intent to reorganize it following is cultural parameters. Following the above, Millán proposes a model that destabilizes the logics of…

¡BAJAD TODOS, MENOS LOS VIGÍAS DE TURNO! – COMENTARIOS SOBRE LA EXPOSICIÓN MOBY DICK Y EL BUQUE GLORIA – ANA MARIA MILLÁN – LUGAR A DUDAS 2013. . ¡Ojo vigías de turno! . La obra de Ana María Millán no tiene la finalidad de ser información ni desinformación, su carácter aparentemente obvio deja los videos en el plano de mostrar (monstrum) y las interpretaciones más usuales giran en torno a su tema evidente. La mano de la artista se vuelve invisible y quizá alguien piense que la virtud de la obra sea el acceso a la imagen, a la información y a la vuelta al mundo (con un toque de redundancia acerca de hechos que de antemano se dan por hecho [1]), que piense también que esa virtud tenga que ver con la capacidad de la obra de mostrar, hacer-evidente lo que se cree no-evidente, espacio del rumor repetido y de la ironía fácil, lugar de la información. Realmente la obra no busca mostrar ni informar a nadie nada y mucho menos al poco público que va hoy en día a las exposiciones. La obra tampoco busca destapar secretos, ni sorprender al desprevenido colombiano que no imagine los paraísos de los que…