Daniel Duque

Film

The discovery of a sharp-leaved flower forges a link between Europe and America. During a voyage across the Atlantic from France to Colombia, the history of a family rises to the surface, with human beings and plants intertwined around care and buried violence.

From as long as I can remember, our grandfather would care for our health with plants. In the centre of Bogotá he would take us into Turkish baths where eucalyptus, mint, orange and pineapple embalmed the hot air. Sitting in the rooms, we let the steam enter our pores; the burning aromas of the tropics relaxed our muscles and opened up our respiratory passages. At midday, our grandfather took us to the restaurant where he launched into his heroic stories of the past, of the days when he was a soldier. Eating with his mouth open, he told his grandchildren legendary, terrifying stories. One of these tales, which I’ve never forgotten, is about the way they used to capture Indians in the forest.

In the 1960s the Colombian state trained soldiers to hunt down indigenous communities in the Amazonian forest in order to bring them into the city and present them at official ceremonies. Mitología de la Saliva (Saliva Mythology) crosses through the layers of this story, exploring the genealogy of violence and the way gentleness, the supernatural and aggression constitute the state, families and the body.

Daniel Duque

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Daniel Duque is a Colombian artist working in the fields of film, installation and drawing. His artistic practice aims to generate new dialogues within the tangled web of ‘reality’, where the personal, water, history and the supernatural interact. The relationship between territoriality and corporeality is a fundamental concept in his work, which is informed by his study of the rhythms of the Afro-Colombian diaspora. By drawing on both new and ancestral forms of knowledge and technology, Daniel seeks out new fissures in time, capable of fracturing and recomposing the formal and narrative structures of the present. His work is deeply shaped by the experience of migration and by a state of the body in the making, which permeates his conception of the moving image. Daniel lives and works in France, where he puts together projects joining Latin America and Europe. His films have been screened at international festivals such as CPH:DOX (Denmark), Alternativa FF (Colombia), GO Short (Netherlands), Vienna Shorts (Austria), amongst others. Daniel studied at Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains in the Martha Graham cohort (2024–2026).

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