In Colombian artist and researcher Felipe Castelblanco's films, land, people and nature seem to speak as one. Multiple perspectives play at the same time on screens, while voices and ambient sounds situate the viewer within an otherwise unfamiliar context. These aural narratives, combined with stoic documentation, offer questions and a way of seeing and listening to the world with nature. The multidisciplinary artist's work, situated at the intersection of social engagement, film and installations, hopes to explore how systems of knowledge that allow for dialogue between nature and anthropocentric perspectives might be established. As the artist underscores in conversation with STIR, "I see my role as one of mediation—where art becomes a vehicle for smuggling, transcoding or reinserting ideas across cultural and epistemic boundaries, often bypassing dominant narratives and their gatekeepers."

A solo exhibition of Castelblanco's work at the Haus for Media Art Oldenburg, Counter-Expeditions, brings the teeming themes he explores—feral ecologies, decolonial documentation, interspecies assemblages and cultural diplomacy through relational awareness—to the fore. The showcase, on view till September 28, 2025, includes documentaries, video installations and photographs the artist worked on over 10 years. The artist is presenting new work including the multichannel video installation Tunda: A Quantic Plant and the Devil’s Breath (2025), as well as the installations Detrás de La Noche, Tulpa and Inverted Oasis (all 2025) that stem from his research, exploration and collaboration with indigenous communities in the Amazon rainforest; along with older documentaries, Ayênan: Water Territories (2022) and Rio Arriba / Upriver (2020). The exhibition brings up what acts of care might look like in forging dialogues between people and place, terrain and ecosystems. This feels especially pertinent for the contexts he explores. The Amazonian rainforests have historically been some of the most exploited natural landscapes, with human intervention having severely depleted the region’s biodiversity, while at the same time abolishing the rights of Indigenous communities that depend on the land.

My process often begins with an unexpected, personal encounter—where relationships and mutual trust form long before any artistic collaboration takes shape. – Felipe Castelblanco

The term itself, counter-expedition, signals Castelblanco's desire to produce novel epistemologies that go against this idea of expedition, charged with connotations of conquest, and the cleaving gaze of colonialism. As he notes reflectively, "I’ve developed what I call a filmic cartography: a visual methodology that resists the disembodied, totalizing gaze of satellite imagery or extractive land surveys. Instead, it seeks to evoke a multisensory experience of place—one that oscillates between human and nonhuman perspectives, canopy and undergrowth, presence and absence." Castelblanco offers a methodology of travelling through his video art that moves slowly, that transforms with, rather than transforming the flora and fauna surrounding the travelling body.

Challenging hierarchical modes of knowing, each research inquiry for him begins from a particular, personal interest. "My process often begins with an unexpected, personal encounter—where relationships and mutual trust form long before any artistic collaboration takes shape. For instance, I met Ayênan Quinchoa Juajibioy of the Kamëntsá people (Putumayo, Colombia) on the final leg of a field trip. We happened to share a long bus ride on the ‘Trampoline of Death’, one of the most dangerous roads in Latin America," Castelblanco notes of the meeting that would result in his work on Water Territories (2022). Driving Juajibioy to a peaceful demonstration organised by his community, Castelblanco got the chance to witness how members of the Ñambi Rimai Media Collective negotiate the vast territories of the lower Amazon and Andean Paramos in the southwest of Colombia.

Similarly, in his most recent work, Tunda, the act of listening, of truly tuning in with the forest around us, is vital. Focusing on certain medicinal plants found in the rainforest, such as the Borrachero andaki, which is also the subject of another work, Devil’s Breath, the film sheds light on the mystical associations communities have with the forest. "How do we know what plants desire?" a narrator questions in Devil’s Breath. This question lies at the heart of Castelblanco’s films, understanding how plants and communities communicate with one another, and if there’s any way of truly depicting this dialogue. The vividness of his documentaries, often employing spectral registers beyond human sight, conjures an image of nature that is toxic, uncontrollable and just a touch surreal. This is showcased most crucially in the film Detrás de la Noche, where he records the forest at night, documenting an extremely rare tree that is neither green nor visible during the day.

In this sense, the artist's role as an explorer (or counter-explorer) in the films, traversing difficult terrain, is not to take possession of the place or the unique encounter. It's about the body as an archive within an eco-social fabric. The artist elaborates, "The works featured in the show trace a 10-year period of movement, dislocation and re-rooting—leaving Colombia, my birthplace, and returning after more than a decade to reconnect with territories I had become estranged from. That process involved more than geography or site-responsive research; it was about re-establishing ties to the biocultural memory of the Putumayo mountains, rivers and residents, and engaging with the rainforest not as a symbolic landscape, but as a living, spiritual and contested territory."

The works in Counter-Expeditions signal the artist's longing for a home that is contested and his desire to reinvent traditions, supporting spaces where Indigenous knowledge thrives. He notes, "Through filmmaking, participatory practices and collaborative production, I hope to contribute—however modestly—to broader efforts of cultural resilience, biocultural peacebuilding and the redistribution of resources and visibility.” Castelblanco's work asks: What do we lose when we extricate ourselves from the natural? Whose vision should we honour, the forest's fertile but inexplicable desires, not tied to humanity’s demands, or the Indigenous communities’ intertwined vision of sustenance? Is it possible to truly listen to our ecologies, to start building a relationship of reciprocity that true collaboration must begin with?

'Counter-Expeditions' by Felipe Castelblanco is on view from July 2 – Spetember 9, 2025, at the Haus for Media Art Oldenburg, Germany.