Sala10: Colectivo Los Ingrávidos

For History to No Longer Be a Grave for the Eye

In The Nest of the Sun, Xólotl, Huitzilin and Xóchitl come together to recover the dance of radiation, whose colorful heat stokes the new fire of their cosmic dance. Let’s consider how we negotiate our internal system for the self-regulation of data. Colectivo Los Ingrávidos make experimental film, but they also hack the system. The threshold for registering the violence and media manipulation to which we’re subjected on a daily basis fluctuates—like everything in life—based on our survival instinct. 2012 was a year in which thousands of young people forced us to lower that threshold. The particularity of the #YoSoy132 student movement involved its direct attack on Mexico’s mass media. Colectivo Los Ingrávidos was founded that same year, and with that same spirit. Their mission has been to seek complicity in desynchronization, scratching, phase difference, superimposition, noise, matter, cyclical and ritual temporality and anything else that can break down the immediacy and clarity of the televised image. Colectivo Los Ingrávidos suggest we take the path that leads from political agitation to trance through what they understand as autonomous images: sensory, perceptive, poetic and speculative structures that convene the “people” in opposition to the administrable population produced by the mass media. In The Nest of the Sun, Xólotl, Huitzilin and Xóchitl come together to recover the dance of radiation, whose colorful heat stokes the new fire of their cosmic dance.

The Nest of the Sun forms part of a trilogy that, in the collective’s words, “is an audiovisual collage that combines the power of film with the magical powers of the moon, the sun and fire, seeking to revive the natural forces of the Mexica cosmovision. Tonalli is divided into three parts, like a shamanic composition. The first part is an atavistic preparation for a flowery war; in the second, we attempted to represent a ceremonial brazier where the different moons can be seen; in the last part, solar radiation represents Tonalli and the life energy possessed by all the world’s beings and objects.”[2] This collective doesn’t just involve people, but also the matter and energy of their interlocutors, whether they be expired 16 mm film, archival images, missing photographic developers, plants or the sun.
 
The sun converts 4 500 000 tons of matter into energy each second. The journey of this energy from the center of the star to its surface takes millions of years, but then it reaches the Earth in just eight minutes and 20 seconds. Upon its arrival, Colectivo Los Ingrávidos filmed it through 24 filters, using a telephoto lens at different speeds. In this project, they didn’t use expired film—as they often do—but instead worked with different exposures and rolls, creating montage directly in the camera. In The Nest of the Sun, Xólotl, Huitzilin and Xóchitl come together to recover the dance of radiation, whose colorful heat stokes the new fire of their cosmic dance.

 

Please excuse this poor attempt to mark a rhythm with a recurring phrase in this text on your screen. It’s an invocation of the collective’s strategy for understanding the surface through a “shamanic materialism” and an “aesthetics of trance” in which the screen becomes a drum, a membrane that induces a trance. The Nest of the Sun is primarily a percussion piece. It’s not just about the visual choreography of the plants and the sun, but a real vibration supported through sound and ancient algorithms of frequency, duration, intensity and texture that provoke a response in the human body. In The Nest of the Sun, Xólotl, Huitzilin and Xóchitl come together to recover the dance of radiation, whose colorful heat stokes the new fire of their cosmic dance.

 

The films of Colectivo Los Ingrávidos are manifestos and theses in themselves, but for those of us who continue to require the written language as a transitional object, the collective also circulates texts:
 
Thesis 22: Materialism is the empirical, contingent, circumstantial, sensory and concrete dimension of objects, documents, archives, remains, and elements.
 
Thesis 23: Shamanism vindicates the suggestion, the omen, trance states, the spell and the superstition on the basis of objects and testimonies.
 
Thesis 24: Shamanic Materialism proceeds by fragments, ruptures, loops, clusters, modules, drifts, ascents, descents, series, spirals, vortexes, pulses, rhythms, entropy, negentropy, hypostasis, collisions, linkages, aberrations, folds, burials, unearthings; and everything which reveals intermittent constellations and from whose magma figures, agitations, forms, structures, processes, relationships, perceptions, speculations and sensations emerge. Shamanic Materialism is a Mesoamerican spell unleashed. [3]
 
In The Nest of the Sun, Xólotl, Huitzilin and Xóchitl come together to recover the dance of radiation, whose colorful heat stokes the new fire of their cosmic dance.

Though we’re no longer used to it, perhaps we miss negotiating with that genre of frank, performative writings known as the manifesto, whose audacity produces a collectivity through direct opposition toward something/someone. In 2008, the Serpentine Gallery attempted to revive the genre by organizing a marathon of manifestos during a futurological congress in order to interrogate their place in the construction of the future—after all, what other kind of rhetoric can compete with its effectiveness at escaping the traps of nihilism and of vague, moderate utopias? [4] Marshall Berman recognized the Communist Manifesto as the origin of the genre of the political manifesto, as well as the first great work of modern art. [5] Political and artistic manifestos are quarrelsome twins that have been difficult to separate; yet in our century, the latter appears to have withdrawn to an introverted, lukewarm and individualistic register. [6]

This does not occur with Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, who have known how to find in the history of avant-gardes and social movements—as well as Mesoamerican cultures—those powers needed to organize an us and overcome their thesis 30 that states history as a grave for the eye, an overdetermination for the ear. [7]
 
Agamben describes the contemporary individual as one who can maneuver between the darkness of the present interpellating them and the light interpolated from other times: “It is as if this invisible light that is the darkness of the present cast its shadow on the past, so that the past, touched by this shadow, acquired the ability to respond to the darkness of the now.” [8] It is along this path that we encounter the cinema of Colectivo Los Ingrávidos: in The Nest of the Sun, Xólotl, Huitzilin and Xóchitl come together to recover the dance of radiation, whose colorful heat stokes the new fire of their cosmic dance.

Alejandra Labastida

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. [...]

COMPLETE TEXT HERE

Colectivo Los Ingrávidos
El nido del Sol [The Nest of the Sun], 2021
Color video
5’14’’
Music: Gustavo Nandayapa

Colectivo Los Ingrávidos (Tehuacán, Puebla, active since 2012)
Los Ingrávidos is a Mexican experimental film collective that was formed in response to the violence of commercial, corporate audiovisual grammar. This collective is inspired by historic avant-gardes and their commitment to instrumentalizing both form and content against alienating realities. They have adopted the radical, alternative grammar of poetic cinema, questioning the cultural bureaucracy and connecting the aesthetic experience to social struggle.