Counter Expeditions

The Haus for Media Art Oldenburg is pleased to present Counter-Expeditions, a major solo exhibition by Colombian American artist, researcher, and filmmaker Felipe Castelblanco. The exhibition premieres multiple 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 expedition 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 us to cross boundaries—physical, mental, and political—that divide knowledge systems and worldviews.

At the heart of the exhibition is the new multichannel video installation Tunda: A Quantic Plant and the Devil’s Breath (2025). Other works in the show 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. His work foregrounds the body as a sensitive instrument for knowing, unlearning, and co-creating narratives in territories marked by rupture and ecological transformation.

Tunda: A Quantic Plant and the Devil’s Breath, realized in the framework of the research project Plants_Intelligence. Learning like a Plant (2022-2025). A research project by Yvonne Volkart, Felipe Castelblanco, Julia Mensch and Rasa Smite, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and hosted by the Institute Art Gender Nature, Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW. In 2024, Castelblanco received the Media Art Grant at the Haus for Media Art Oldenburg, funded by Stiftung Niedersachsen.