Ana María Millán
Elevación [Elevation]
![Elevación [Elevation], 2019 (still)](https://kadist.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/IMG_escena001_3513-1024x576.jpg)
![Elevación [Elevation], 2019 (still)](https://kadist.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/IMG_escena003_0245-1024x576.jpg)
![Elevación [Elevation], 2019 (still)](https://kadist.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/IMG_escena001_0621-1024x576.jpg)
Interested in role-play and videogames, Ana María Millán developed workshops with different communities in order to create characters and scenarios for her animations, often in collaboration with a choreographer. Elevación evokes various narratives inspired by the comicstrip Marquetalia, Raíces de la Resistencia (Marquetalia, Roots of the Resistance) (2011). This comic strip is a memoir of the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) guerillas written by Jesús Santrich, one of its leaders who, after the 2016 Peace Agreement, rejoined dissident members of the organization in a clandestine guerrilla splinter group in 2019. Millán’s work reflects on Colombia’s constant armed conflict, land ownership, and popular struggles, but with a specific interest in popular culture and contemporary visual languages in alignment with her topics of research.
Post-production is essential to the artist’s work insofar as she uses this process to create a meta-text that holds all the permutations of the narrative. This technology allows Millán to hybridize the languages, genres, forms, and methods in her video work. In Elevación Millán foregrounds the intersections between seemingly disparate groups, emphasizing underlining connections and collaborations to reveal the interplay between key characters and online subcultures.
An active artist since the mid 1990s, Ana María Millán’s early works employed popular culture as a vehicle to research Colombia’s idiosyncrasies, and how it has been impacted by corruption, social inequality, and violence. She has embraced a precarious aesthetic language which gives form to her interest in how the political is reflected in popular culture, both mainstream and underground. Often embracing unorthodox narrative forms, Millán’s video works maintain a skeptical distance while still illustrating personalized stories, specifically focusing on how information is transmitted in relation to local Colombian subcultures, violence, and occluded discourses. Millán is a founding member of Helena Producciones, a crucial art collective who organized several editions of Cali’s Performance Festival and other curatorial and artistic projects, seminal in Cali’s and Colombia’s contemporary art context.