In this interview, we talk with the artist Milena Bonilla, looking into her recent residency at the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, exploring, among other things, the genesis of her project. Milena reflects on her Colombian origins, the complexity of identity, and the transformative power of archives. She discusses her artistic evolution and explores how historical exploration and contemporary expression intersect in her work, shedding light on wider social dynamics.
Join us in exploration of Milena Bonilla’s artistic journey, a harmonious blend of history, identity, nature, and change.
Zuzanna Auguścik: I would like to start our conversation by talking about the residency programme you participated in at the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle from June to August. Could you elaborate on the specific project you worked on? How did the environment and resources offered by the institution contribute to the development and completion of this project?
Milena Bonilla: I came to Warsaw with a background of recent years spent working on the intersection of plants, politics, and agency. Within this broad context I developed a body of work with the help of Rosa Luxemburg’s Herbarium, which is kept in the Archiwum Akt Nowych in Warsaw. This was the context of my invitation. During my trip in Poland I decided that the best would be to be open to the environment, as I already have the files provided by the archive, also knowing that accessing the original herbarium was not anymore allowed.
I then worked mostly writing and collecting samples of plants. The aim was to establish a connection between the knowledge we acquire through spoken/written language and the potential to tap into the non-linguistic agency of plants. To achieve it, I drew upon concepts from cybernetics, exploring the idea that we can communicate with the world beyond the constraints and codes dictated by logic, embracing the notion of metabolism as a set of metamorphic interactions that happen in our (social) bodies beyond the linguistic.
I sense an invitation to accept and embrace alternative epistemic diversities that can teach us through waves of information translating themselves metabolically in our bodies with the aid of plants, their traditional uses, components, alkaloids and shapes.
Z.A: Your residency took place in a particular European region. Was there a specific reason you chose this side of Europe for your residency? How did the local environment influence your artistic exploration during this period?
M.B: Usually, when I directly apply for a residency, there’s an existing connection between my practice and the place I’m applying to. However, this time, I was invited (a joyful coincidence) based on the work I had already undertaken concerning the legacy of Luxemburg. This background gave me the opportunity to, through different encounters and synchronicities, start re-calibrating how that legacy encounters the present and what kind of lines of thought coming from there started to gain strength during my residency.
Z.A: Residencies often offer artists a unique space for experimentation and growth. Was there a particular moment from your residency in Warsaw where you felt you were able to push the boundaries of your artistic practice?
M.B: Yes, and it was literally pushing a boundary within a boundary, specifically along the border with Belarus in Podlasie. I had developed projects situated along various international borders, but, again in this case I ended up there by invitation. The events that took place during that trip left a mark in the way that I understand my practice, and that cannot be undone!
Z.A: What advice or tips for emerging artists who are considering a residency opportunity could you offer based on your own experiences? How can young artists make the most of the residency opportunity to enhance their creative development?
M.B: I think it is important to go with the flow. Sometimes we push the creation of something in an environment unknown to us instead of listening to what the place has to say. I am more prone to let space and its energy sink in, and normally, the thing that needs to be done would appear if its manifestation is necessary in the world. By “sinking in” I refer to people, landscapes, daily impressions, smells, emotional connections, chance encounters and so on. Even if I come up with a specific idea, the mere presence of a new place normally challenges it in a way distinct from a process that unfolds in the familiar security of a known place, community or studio.
Z.A: Many of your projects involve research and archival work. How do you balance historical exploration with contemporary artistic expression and how does this intersection contribute to the meaning of your art in today’s world?
M.B: Archives are encoded places containing information that transcends what is intellectually presented. Artistic practices have the capacity to delve into the nuances of information that is taken for granted by unpacking correspondences in the present that, sometimes, artists themselves aren’t aware of. In my experience, half of the work is done by the archive itself, it’s as though it asks for some release in its charged, overwhelmed space of data accumulation. It’s as if this accumulation of information asks to be recognized under different rubrics. Again, it is a question of listening to the spaces, the materiality of the documents not separated from the information written or exposed in them, the places they are in, the people that guards them, the politics of the places that saved them, the oppression that very often can be sensed in these places of privileged gazes under the name of expertise. In my exploration of archives, my role has been to play actively with the material provided by stretching aspects of the content that are ungraspable by historical account alone.
Z.A: Your work often explores themes of displacement and identity. What does the term identity mean to you? What do you think shapes it? Could you explain how your Colombian and Dutch background has influenced your artistic perspective and practice?
M.B: To clarify, I don’t have a Dutch background other than living and working in Amsterdam. I migrated from Colombia to study in the Netherlands. And I can say that I migrated from a territory whose complexity (as with any other nation state) can’t be trapped under the idea of a nation, but alas it is. In that regard, if you are asking about national identity, mine is an apparently borrowed fiction that embodies persistent colonial presence. With that said, my emotional, psychological, political and artistic education is intertwined with growing up within a tropical presence, shaped by a timeframe that influenced my work in a way attached to the immediacy and urgencies of the places I lived in. During this period I was strongly influenced by the everyday, including the political landscape of Colombia and its ideological conflicts.
I started to work much more consciously with history when in Europe after developing a series of works on Marx back at home. More than a sheer personal desire, this was a sort of magnetic task on how to negotiate space and time in the place where this time-memory-history continuum was erected with all its monumentality. I experienced this continuum differently in Colombia, where there exists a form of existential anarchy regarding the concept of monumental history – at least within the domestic education, perspectives, phenomena and people I grew up and developed my work with.
Z.A: Your artistic practice has exhibited a sustained interest in exploring the relationship between the human and plant worlds. Could you elaborate on the inspiration behind this thematic focus and how it manifests in your work? How do you see the interaction between humans and plants as a metaphor for broader societal, ecological or cultural dynamics?
M.B: My first approach to plants has a twofold path, dating back to 2003. I started by being interested in the transformation of plants into branded commodities through industrial processes – products such as packaged, processed or synthetic food and drugs. This exploration extended to another facet of colonialism, focusing on plants like coca, corn, tomato or potato (all of which are local and pre-Hispanic foods). These plants would end up transformed into different branding where their consumption, although easier and immediate, would leave a sensation of emotional apathy (a literal hole in the stomach!). This intersects with the recollection of my grandmother’s teachings on plants’ medicinal and nutritious potentials.
Over time, it became a question concerning how modern Western culture imposed its desires into the plant universes by silencing them in the most clumsy and toxic way possible: first, by considering them inanimate, second, by regarding them as non-sentient, and third, by relegating them to a category. And then, there’s the immediacy of capitalist production, an imposed perception of time scarcity destroying an organic intimacy with plants as agents, teachers, and companions.
Fast forward 20 years, my current work on plants revolves around rewiring my desire in connection with a paradigm shift. This shift entails to experience plants beyond consumption, to engage with them beyond use, acknowledging them as our ancestors and marveling at the messages they spread between the sun and the soil, mediated through social and individual metabolic processes. And this is a way to manifest them as part of a planetary need of recognizing life beyond commodification. As you may have already seen, this is the path that a big chunk of people has been following in different fronts, which means that there’s a need for change in that realm. It is happening.
Z.A: To end our conversation, could you share with us what is in store for you in the near future? Whether it’s upcoming projects, personal aspirations or creative goals, what can we expect from Milena Bonilla? Also, if there is a motto that has shaped your artistic journey, we would love to hear it.
M.B: I went back to teaching last year. In September I’m starting as a core tutor in the Master’s program of Planetary Poetics at Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam.
Nowadays I am very much interested in opening spaces for dialogue and sharing experiences, not only intellectually but mostly embracing creativity with a strong focus in a blend between politics of space and care, the understanding of agency beyond the human, the channeling of collective rage and the sheer importance of tenderness. I am betting on spaces of art and education where we can openly talk and work on the social, ecological, political, and psychological wounds that both historical and current times have left in our collective mind, in order to gather strength through care and playfulness.
