2026 | Main Prize Winner
Felipe Castelblanco is a multidisciplinary artist, researcher, and filmmaker working at the intersection of participatory, film, and Media Art. Tunda: A Quantic Plant and the Devil’s Breath is a multi-channel video that explores the entangled histories of plants and colonial extraction. We see an Indigenous man thrust from the Colombian Amazon to the Swiss Alps, drifting between vision and reality. Landing in a remote museum’s herbarium, he encounters botanical artifacts relating to the Brugmansia plant. This plant is a powerful teacher for Kamnënstá Indigenous healers in Colombia’s Andean-Amazon region. Among these communities, it is believed to possess the ability to cross boundaries of time and space. The work combines science, ethnomedicine, and ecology, encouraging us to question how we see things.
