Dancing Between Shamanic Materialism and the Aesthetics of Trance: A Conversation Between Colectivo Los Ingrávidos and Alejandra Moreno 

Alejandra Moreno (AM): The use of the archive has allowed us to rewrite, reconfigure, rethink and remake history/histories; nevertheless, when digitized, it creates tension around its authenticity. The archive then becomes many things: memory, rereading, salvage and even excess. Archival material takes on a leading role in the different audiovisual pieces that you have developed as a collective. Your manifesto states that one of the missions of your practice is to subvert neutralized immediacy. Does the use of the archive in your work create complicity for this end? How do you understand the archive in your practice?

 

Colectivo Los Ingrávidos (CLI): We feel that the archive is a form of disruption, the beginnings of subversion through a strategic indeterminacy; that is, we understand the archive as being ancestral to the extent that it provides us with an absolute beginning where we can find ourselves. Thus conceived, the archive is indeterminate immediacy, immediacy being the form of disruption with indeterminacy as our improvisational material, our way of accumulating and transposing the random, the contingent, the vulnerable.

AM: The Nest of the Sun, like the other pieces that make up the series Tonalli, recalls what Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui calls the decolonization of the gaze to the extent that one observes a return to ancestral knowledge, particularly Mesoamerican knowledge. In this piece, one notes that it’s not conceived through melancholy or idealization, as if this history had died and all we could do was recount it. On the contrary, we are faced with a project for the construction of a narrative that aims at rewriting through the dance of the visual image and the auditory image (a mechanism you make use of in your work). I feel that all this allows for these forms of knowledge to recover their agency. Why should we turn to them at this historic moment?

 

CLI: We feel that ancestral forms of knowledge are not retrogradable from the historic but retroactive from the present, suspensive for the future, destructive of any instrumentalized posterity. They are rhythmic centralizers that provide us with dance, trance and ritual. Knowledge that cannot be analyzed nor deconstructed and is therefore ancestral, originary and initiatory.

 

AM: I’d like to discuss the power of what your collective has called the aesthetics of trance and those juxtapositions of images that break with linear time, but that recognize that we are all interconnected, taking us somewhere closer to ritual than habitual aesthetics. When watching and listening to your work, I think of the feminist María Galindo’s poetic definition of unusual alliances, which remind us of the vital interconnections we all share, defending what hasn’t been fragmented and imagining combinations, in direct opposition to the Enlightenment project in which knowledge is divided into disciplines. Do you feel that this way of constructing other narratives implies a confrontation with that Enlightenment strategy?

 

CLI: We feel that the Enlightenment has been one of the most corrosive failed projects for dogmatic secularization in history. Unlike ancestral knowledge, the Enlightenment is retrogradable to the point at which it becomes intermittent, fragmented and discontinuous matter. Trance operates on the decomposing matter of this enlightened knowledge, braiding the fragmentary and intermittent aspect with the continuous and invariable aspect of sounds and images, awakening a rhythmic potential that precipitates ritual, complicity, liturgy and dance.

 

AM: In your work, you have addressed the theme of trauma and absence. We know that the 2014 disappearance of 43 teaching students from Ayotzinapa represented a watershed moment for your production. In this sense, and taking our social context into account, what do you think about the use of poetic strategies for the construction of new visual languages that allow us to consider processes for healing, repair or regaining strength? Could artistic practices form part of the antidote for this traumatic process that confronts us?

 

CLI: Just as we proclaim an aesthetics of trance, we also convoke and invoke a sublative logic that operates anonymously in poetic strategies and artistic practices. We feel that every traumatic process demands sublation (a sublevation), but that sublation is inviable without an unusual alliance, that which juxtaposes and connects ablutions, oblations and sublations in the midst of the sordid. All healing and repair requires the construction of ascensional sepultures as ways of regaining strength, subtractive ablutions and atavistic superstitions as new audiovisual languages. Liturgical sublations as ancestral revolt. Infraenlightened suggestions that counteract both the insufferable, arrogant neutrality of the forensic as well as the opulent serfdom of corporate architectures.