COUNTER-EXPEDITIONS: CASTELBLANCO DISMANTLES THE COLONIAL IMAGINATION OF TRAVEL

The Haus for Media Art Oldenburg presents Counter-Expeditions, a solo exhibition by Colombian American artist, researcher, and filmmaker Felipe Castelblanco. The show premieres several new works and offers a ten-year retrospective of the artist’s cross-disciplinary practice. It brings together a constellation of films, video installations, and photographs created in collaboration with communities across multiple geographies—from the Andean-Amazon foothills to the North Atlantic.

Rooted in a conceptually rich practice of situated research and artistic intervention, Counter-Expeditions proposes a radical rethinking of the colonial and epistemic legacy of the expedition. While the traditional one is framed as an act of conquest, discovery, or extraction, Castelblanco’s counter-expeditions offer an embodied, reciprocal form of movement—one that prioritizes encounter, care, and dialogue with people and places. These works invite to cross boundaries—physical, mental, and political—that divide knowledge systems and worldviews.

In Counter-Expeditions the movement of the travelers across terrains forms a continuum that puts one place in dialogue with the next. Therefore, counter-explorers do not aim to take possession of the memory, the place or the novelty of the encounter. Nor do they seek to claim parts of the landscape to justify the journey. Instead, they bring new energy into the eco-social fabric through acts of offering, reciprocity, celebration, contemplation, and cooperation with those living and caring for the places that welcome them in. Unlike the flaneur, it is exposed and their own body endures, filters, absorbs and even carries each site within as a collection of experiences, minglings, unlearnings, and odd encounters with biocultural landscapes in constant flux.

At the heart of the exhibition is the new multichannel video installation Tunda: A Quantic Plant and the Devil’s Breath (2025). Other works on display include Ayênan: Water Territories (2022), Rio Arriba / Upriver (2020), and Driftless (2019), projects in which Castelblanco offers a methodology of traveling otherwise, blurring the lines between participatory art, fieldwork, film, and activism. These works foreground the body as a sensitive instrument for knowing, unlearning, and co-creating narratives in territories marked by rupture and ecological transformation.

Felipe Castelblanco is a Colombian American artist and filmmaker whose socially engaged practice operates at the intersection of cinema, performance, and territorial research. He is postdoctoral fellow at the Institute Art Gender Nature, HGK Basel FHNW. He holds an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburg, and a PhD from the Kunstuniversität Linz and HGK Basel FHNW. His work has been exhibited internationally, and he is the founder of The Para-Site School as well as Media Collectives across Europe and Latin America.

*Cover image: Tunda: A Quantic Plant and the Devil’s Breath (stills), 2025.