NOS HAN DADO LA TIERRA

The camera, the lens, the window of the film is present and made evident through its edges in each of the pieces in this program. The film registers as a document, without color correction. These apparently aesthetic decisions are also intuitive, they remind us of the act of observing individually but also of belonging to the context of the work as a collective presence. Have you ever stopped to physically recognize your point of view? Both in saturated, overcrowded public spaces, and also in the private spaces dedicated to spirituality, introspection, and reflection it is possible to identify ourselves. This is how Los Ingrávidos establish a unique relationship between the spectators and the moving images they create. Moving images that are faithfully presented following the collective’s mission of "dismantling the corporatized audiovisual grammar."

Anábasis represents the constant march, in this case, the march of a people whose historical repression allows them no rest. As I discover the film, I search with my eyes–looking through this path–for the shops along Ahumada Boulevard in Santiago de Chile. The setting seems so familiar. However, I know from the beginning that we are in Mexico, reliving the endless struggles of the working class. In this psychophysical intersection we become part of the march, the protest, the much-feared "mass" that rallies. Have you ever been part of a protest? Do you remember that ever-present bodily sensation of being surrounded by so many others, united in a common song? The people make demands, demands defended with an intentional popular voice, but demands that hardly receive lasting political support. The powers only modulate resonances that appeal to them. Perhaps that’s why the sound of the film is an expression of electrical distortions. The body of the mass that lasts. The body is political. There are no defenses of the demos in this partial democracy, a democracy that exists only for some and not for all, that is for Latin American capitalism, which kills in order to convince. The word used here comes from Latin “convincere”. The word used by governments should be “vencere” (conquer), without the prefix “con” (with) (because there are no ways to explain the deaths and injuries caused by the massive repression of the military and police forces. Latin American people share a  leader whose face is always the same, a president who acts like a dictator. And here I don't use gender-inclusive language because how many female presidents have we had in Latin America? In the United States? In the world? In Chile we say "until when?" Throughout Latin America we say "we do not forget". In Mexico, they say "October 2nd is not forgotten", not forgotten after 50 years.

ANÁBASIS

Colectivo los Ingrávidos / 2019 / 16mm / color / sound / 5'

Born in South America to pagan and Christian influences, I learned from a young age the domestic meaning of an altar. The purpose of an altar is to incorporate, into a significant place of a home, the images of the deities that accompany and protect us on a daily basis. It is very likely that many of our sacred corners have been colonized. Figures of virgins are likely to be more numerous than those of christs or of sacred hearts. I would dare to say that even Indian and Chinese gods and goddesses are worshiped and adored by Latin American devotees. Our deities come from all over the world because those originating from our land have been ripped from their roots. The deities of Los Ingrávidos still live, beyond the colony, deep in the earth. They appear to have been displaced from their temples, but in their removal they find new establishments. In highly vegetated corners they recover the force with which they were shaped. They seem to be cleansed  on their way to the dimension of the sacred. Ants feed on their powers. The hasty images try to replicate the cultural wealth of pre-Columbian ancestral Mexico. Those rituals invoked by the camera shots appear with lit fire in the middle of a crowd. Deities jump sporadically in between urban centers trying to return to a geography that has buried them under the pavement. Trying to decolonize the altars that will come because the altar is pagan and can rise at any moment/ground.

ALTARES

Colectivo los Ingrávidos / 2019 / 16mm / color / sound / 4'

For 8 minutes the camera is awakened in tireless movement. Pyramids that have been eroding after being abandoned by their residents, now in careless contact with new visitors who are not cautious. Pyramids falling into pieces in every corner of the Aztec territory. What we find in the soil of this territory is part of a whole. Fragments of a latent distant past. The camera in movement reminds us of Deleuze’s invocation of the moving image translated from the manifestation of the cinematic spirit. It is in that moment that the still image is lost in the continuum of 24 frames per second. Sometimes more, sometimes less. The moving camera calls for the reconstruction of an image suspended in time. An eroded symbolism. The stone is a landmark, a remnant that contains an echo, a memory that resonates. If our bodies resonated they would destroy, turn into particles, we would become dust. Los Ingrávidos use all film material available to them. Different stocks are mixed and there are no out-takes. There are no shots to spare but no parts are missing. Through appending squares, a pyramid is reconstructed in the unconscious. The improvisation of musical instruments is a meditation in transe, accompanied by the light leaks in the film. Percussion prints the image in one beat, it reverberates, it strikes. The sound pops like corn kernels, like popcorn in a theater of rituals that question the enjoyments  of commercial cinema.

ERODED PYRAMID

Colectivo los Ingrávidos / 2019 / 16mm / color / sound / 9'

Each body observes from two different angles. For each body two different versions of what happened. For each government, there seems to be a different version of facts. Containment and repression. When crowds march to settle accounts with the repressive government, the government "contains" them. A battle between chaos and order. The images intervene. The same way that the population tries to change the norm. The analog observes the digital. As one films the other they become another layer. The protests, the mass acts become a gesture. What do the people of Mexico want? The people and the workers have faces. The government and its contenders (armed force), don’t. They act anonymously. They are an entity without memory, without eyes. The images glitch, the windows and the mirrors are broken. Colors are generated from the masses and from the colors we are expelled into a space of intense green, the same space that I remember when someone says "nature" in my confinement. The cloudy, dark, underexposed sky. We stare at the gods looking back at us, incredulous. The distance between the bodies on earth and our brightest star is revealed.

PARALAJE

Colectivo los Ingrávidos / 2019 / 16mm / color / sound / 5'

Film that is started by chemical processes is often perceived as organic. The first minutes of Coyolxauhqui are full of fertile landscapes, fruits, flowers and insects from this area that are a reflection of the abundance of the land. In this piece, more than in others, out of focus or soft focus is introduced, softening the contours and allowing an ambiguity to be generated in the shapes. Little by little, bursts of fruits appear in focused close-ups. The images play in between these hard and soft extremes. The filmic experimentations of Los Ingrávidos take us into natural worlds that have been disrupted by the magic invoked between light and film (the layers of crystals). Once entered, the obscurities of the Aztec culture emerge as antecedents maintained in a present judgement. The night falls in silence. The tragic destinies of goddesses and gods are revealed in direct connection with the tragedies of the Mexican people and their vulnerable characters. Women, and any body that identifies as or appears docile, feminine, queer, androgynous, trans, are exposed to a history covered by the patriarchy. Dresses, high heels, wallets, bras, panties, long hair, all these iconic garments appear as torn symbols, scattered on the ground or hanging from the high branches of a tree that further darkens this trampled inheritance of shadows. The cries for help are muffled but footprints appear when light shines. Silence is scratched and these in turn sing in contralto. From above, our mothers and sisters lament. The earth will always be a witness to our acts of abandonment, regardless of our wish to forget, regardless of how many times they make us disappear.

COYOLXAUHQUI

Colectivo los Ingrávidos / 2019 / 16mm / color / sound / 9'46"

The presence of multiple exposures thins each visual layer and makes it more fragile. A suggested abundance represented by fruits and other offerings is superimposed on images of the sky, the sea, the earth and their creations. And on the plane of suggestion the edge of a knife appears. The sound creates suspense. A disjointed text is heard as a murmur, it transforms into echo, songs, resonances that multiply like ripples in the water. Dissonances seek to transcend rather than to ascend. Sun-born life can be torn off by faceless beings because in its potential proliferation it becomes more vulnerable. Those who do show their face tirelessly protest, with their left fists raised, to reclaim those weaknesses. The moving bodies appear to tell a collective story. A history that repeats itself for the Mexican people. A history that is repeated in 3 of the 6 films collected here and that is repeated in the history of all Latin American peoples. We burn to sow and to build great cities. The film is a tribute to the choirs that are the witnesses and voices of an insistent memory. The film is the impression and expression of that memory.

THE SUN QUARTET, PART 1: PIEDRA DE SOL

Colectivo los Ingrávidos / 2017 / 16mm / color / sound / 8'24"

The films by Los Ingrávidos Collective remind me of the magnetism of high mountains. In Chile, I experienced this in the town of Cochiguaz, in the interior of the Elqui Valley, where the Cancana mountain  is located. The flashes in the sky can be compared to the glare generated in a quick montage, with multiple exposures, and in the flash of light that enters the film every time the camera starts to roll. Most of these effects that the Collective uses are cut out of industry films, with copies ready for distribution. These effects generate a threshold that is reflected in the work as an object and in the experience of the work in itself. A connection that can also be translated into a metaphor for the space between the tangible and the spiritual; protest and ritual; physical abuse and death. It is in these “in betweens” that this weightless, floating cinema lives.

IN RESPONSE TO CURRENT EVENTS

There are bursts, movements, claims, revolutions, and summons. In all of them the common place is the common, the commune, the community, the people. In the streets property reigns over life. Recent events make me want to disregard the body as territory. I no longer want to think of my corpus as a place for sale, livable, profitable, manageable. I no longer want to think that this corpus has owners who claim each bone as their own and are capable of eliminating so many for so little. Let me be a soul, a spirit. Let me be the water and the fire. Let me be the air. But now more than ever, don't let me be the earth. I no longer want to be the earth. I no longer want to be sold, bought, used, abandoned, or won by those straw men. This is a lament. This is not a celebration. It is a resignation.

"We are peasants, we are people from the countryside. It reminds us of exactly where we come from, our origin, our identity, and it reminds us that, we here in Ayotzinapa do not remove the identity of the people, but rather, we take them deeper into it ”

What does it mean to fragment the earth? The flowers, the sun that wakes them up? What does it mean to work the land? Join forces of peers growing intertwined on bright stems and leaves. What does it mean to give up the land to see a field grow freely? Giving up property to unite communes? What does it mean to reseed to raise and bury to arise?

What does it mean to grow up without belonging? What does it mean to migrate without occupying? What does it mean to miss without knowing? What does it mean to walk without being able to return? What does it mean to leave? To break your back, to water with your forehead, to choke with your eyes. “They were very happy at work, they messed around among themselves to kill the day. It was a very close and hard working academy. ”

On the night of September 26, 2014, the corrupt police in Cocula and Iguala attacked 43 students from the Ayotzinapa rural school.Planting marigold flowers for the Day of the Dead was one of the last actions students did before being brutally disappeared.

EL TRABAJO DE NUESTROS COMPAÑEROS

Colectivo los Ingrávidos /2014 / 35mm / color / sound / 12'20"

The moon is full. The Moon is lit. The Moon has a covered face. Asking you to look back at them.

Water in the four cardinal points

Calm, enraged is the sea

Naked harmony, early disagreement

Underfoot fire

Restless, the flames find me

Incited love, red desert

Moon dances, when you ask me to follow you but you insist on throwing me

When you call me by another name and you take refuge in your eclipses.

When the fire reduces and the waters swell,

to dust, the bodies.

How long does it take to say goodbye? How long does it take to take the memories apart? How long does it take for an organism to decay? Decomposition or without composition? improvise–the screaming– in complete silence–

To cut off Medusa's head, Juan's, Coyolxauhqui's, María Antonieta's. Dress a new goddess, shy and suspicious. Raise a new goddess who’s skin is brown and gold. 

For a while the skin hasn’t covered me. The eroded skin scraped by the lunar surface wants to tear off my nails. When you said my skin was soft, we never imagined it this dry from neglect. My skin is no longer my skin. It is a fabric, a lattice in sequence that resonates with stubborn gears.

You are not going to say no to me, because I can no longer wait for your context. You are not going to ask me to walk away, because I have already transferred the anguish.

Now you'll see me present

The eyes cannot be closed

Ears don't hurt

Nothing is random. Your strikes are my acts. Your shots are my prey.

My body is my protest

What unites us

They are millions who reclaim.

LUNAR DANCES

Colectivo los Ingrávidos / 2020 / 16mm / color / sound / 9'22"

I woke up this morning thinking how everything has changed yet in changing we go back to the origin.

Since the pandemic started we have been forced to communicate differently.

Some of the connections got paused, some got lost forever and some deteriorated over time. Some connections were recovered. Like recovering time, Ruiz would say. We were challenged to look at others with different eyes and look within even deeper. My memory is fragile. Why do I feel like I’m living something I lived in the past? It is hard to identify what’s new or what’s old. I perceive a mist that’s rendering my physical experience. It reads as the suspension of the physical. Smells like confusion. I wake up several times in the morning to realize once and once again that without those dreams I woke up from, I wouldn’t know how to differentiate hours from days. 

I hear fireworks every night starting at 9pm. It is not a routine, it is indeed repetitive and begins every night at the exact same time but it’s not monotonous. It is not how society would have wanted the night to sound like. Society created traffic to drive and stop and drive in endless circles. Community has created rituals out of fire and fire out of frozen bones. My neighbors light their fire pit and gather around it in a circle. It’s easy to confuse the gatherings for meetings and meetings for societies. These fire blasts I hear outside are screaming that rituals aren’t pleasant. Rituals relate to death, birth, transformation, reshaping, morphing, bonding, secreting, unearthing, expelling, they exist in the vitality of chaos, which precedes the attachment to contemporary architecture. It’s independency. It’s liberating. It’s liberating us from isolation and confinement. It is the ritual the thing that brings new ways and new lives. Life on earth depends on collectiveness. We depend on our people.    

At 2 am the fire ceases. The night goes back to silence as it waits for another ritual the next day. And this is how death is named and life is celebrated. A memorial is built but not as a monument because it lives in the memory of the common. And this is how we create a new experience that will not fit the size of our old society because it is collective. It does not depend on lifeless structures, but on bodies, cold and hot, that have learned how to breathe and light the air.

MEMORIAL

Colectivo los Ingrávidos / 2019 / 16mm / color / sound / 14' 41

“This is the country of mass graves… the country of children in flames, the country of tormented women…” “… Whoever reads this must also know that despite everything the dead have not departed nor have they been disappeared” 

Conflagration, in Spanish, a battle, a war, a conflict; in English, a destructive fire that puts all life at risk and at the same time endangers all territory, free and owned. 

Conflagration is one and the other. It is the shouting of asphyxiated sons, shredded daughters and expelled queer children. Conflagration is the fire that exterminates sacred land to impose sowing, but it is also the fire that illuminates eager eyes, while the protest thunders on the street. 

Poetry of the dead

Sounds of protests

Compositions of the revolt

The people manifest through their voices

The voice lasts beyond death, beyond oppression, beyond the “murderous governments” and their violent police. 

The people demonstrate at unison, gathered by the demand of a decent life. 

The people say: I can’t breathe, never again, no more abuse, October 2nd will not be forgotten, March 13th will not be forgotten, May 25th will not be forgotten, May 27th will not be forgotten… the people cry. The people sing. Polyphonic choirs have inspired entire independence movements.  

The voice is a guide and a demand.

The more capitals continue to progress becoming smart cities, the more the distance grows between governments and those governed by it. 

In a city of tall towers and homeless skirts,

Injustice is heard in the vastness,

Equality, reverbs on remote walls,

Dignity can be barely read by tenants who wipe their shoes and leave behind their perfumed masks.   

New bus stops no longer take you to constitution squares written by citizens.

The big highways drive you on endless circles. 

Governments have taken it upon themselves to deprive us from sleep to wonder aimlessly, exhausted. 

They let us march for a couple of hours and then they remind us how security and public order come first and before life. 

They say:

Desist

Legality

Endanger

Respect

Requests and demands

Damage property

Dialogue

They act:

Alienation – Ambiguity – Distance - Apathy

For them, the capital leader, we are not life, we are burden, we are plague, we are pandemic, and we are the mass. 

In the agony, having all of our intimacies violated, our bodies abused under the constitutional right for manifestation. Rulers and rule officers force us to face death once and once again. The spit on us, they choke us, they suffocate us, they make our faces swell, they burst us, they beat us, they rape us, they infect us, they lie to us, their faceless smiles do not look us in the eye, they give us their backs, they make us disappear, they avoid us, they ignore us, they underestimate us, they make us silent memory but never official history.

Conflagration

On our part, WE RESIST.

On our side, WE INSIST.

For our bodies, PATIENCE. STRUGGLE. And again RESISTANCE. 

But already the skin becomes intolerant, sensitive, irritable. These have been years of roughnesses, of callouses, of broken knuckles, of arched and burned backs. These have been years of rules and regulations imposed, agreed, falsified, impregnated with deculturation. These have been years of heteronormative and patriarchy. These have been years of white men, washed out, without color, without smell, without touch, indolent, millionaires. The buildings they build carry vital sacrifices. It's 30 years, it's 50 years, it's 250 years, it's 400 years ...

The fire on our side expands and purifies. We meet in barricades and pyres. We take refuge in a common pot. We are still fighting. Our shields are the hands that know the daily and poorly paid work. They are hands that have become accustomed to helping, lifting, holding, amending, transforming, retouching; the fallen, the hopes, the struggles, the wounds, the limits, the tired faces.

"When you sing, I sing for your freedom"  

THIS IS THE VOICE OF THE PEOPLE.

At the end, we see a portal and above it, an open grave. We look at the horizon standing and also at rest. Beyond is a light that indicates a beginning and that opens one last look at the sky before turning it inside. The sound of past manifestations resonate like echoes. Our existence is floating but our songs continue playing in life and in death.

THE SUN QUARTET, PART 3: CONFLAGRATION

Colectivo los Ingrávidos / 2017 / 16mm / color / sound / 16' 22

Text written by Anto Astudillo June 2020

Colectivo Los Ingrávidos (Tehuacán) is a Mexican audiovisual collective founded in 2012 that was born from the need to disarticulate the audiovisual grammar that aesthetic-television-cinematographic corporatism has used and uses to effectively guarantee the dissemination of an audiovisual ideology through which a continuous social and perceptive control is maintained over the majority of the population. The collective was founded on the inspiration of the historical avant-gardes, and on the defense of a riskier independent and experimental cinema tied to a commitment of form and content against alienating realities. Their methods combine digital and analog material, found footage, mythology, music, social protests, and documentary poetry. Los ingrávidos have participated in different exhibitions and festivals such as: International Film Festival Rotterdam, Whitney Biennial 2019; BFI-London Film Festival; RIDM Montreal International Documentary Festival; Punto de Vista - International Documentary Film Festival of Navarra; Short Film Festival Oberhausen; Media City Film Festival; Ann Arbor Film Festival; Anthology Film Archives; The Flaherty Film Seminar; Images Festival-Toronto; CROSSROADS 2018 San Francisco Cinematheque; SFMOMA - Museum of Modern Art; Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival, Czech Republic; Point of view. International Documentary Film Festival of Navarra, FLEX The Florida Experimental Film / Video Festival; BIM Biennial of the Moving Image - Buenos Aires.Youth in Point of View Award - International Documentary Film Festival of Navarra 2019; Twice winners of the 2 Norberto Griffa Prize for Latin American Audiovisual Creation in the Biennial of the Moving Image of Argentina (2014-2016); The Marian McMahon Akimbo Award at Images Festival - Toronto 2018; Third Award at Media City Film Festival 2018.

Anto Astudillo is a queer non-binary experimental filmmaker, curator and performance artist from Santiago, Chile, living and working in Brooklyn, NY. Rooted in physical theater, Anto explores dynamic interconnections between experimental narrative, poetic documentary filmmaking and performance art. Anto has taught 16mm film production, experimental film, dance film and performance at Emerson College, Keene State College and Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Anto is one of the founding members of the AgX Film Collective, taking the role of organizing screenings to promote alternative practices in filmmaking, leading film camera workshops and developing experimental work. Anto is a 2017 Flaherty Seminar Ford Foundation Curatorial Fellow and a 2020/2021 Oberhausen Film Festival Seminar Fellow . Their recent work has been screened in several underground festivals, galleries and film series, including Mills Gallery at Boston Center for the Arts, Echo Park Film Center, Montreal Underground Film Festival, Artifact Small Format Film Festival, Crater-Lab, Zumzeig CineCooperativa, Hot Bits Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives and Craig Baldwin’s film series Other Cinema in San Francisco. Currently, Anto curates film screenings as an independent programmer and is a Program Coordinator at The Flaherty. Since March, 2020 Anto has been touring with experimental film screening about Chile’s social movement "The People’s Revolt" motivated by a sold out premiere at Anthology Film Archive shown in January, 2020 (the tour has been postponed due to Covid-19 crisis and is now having online screenings).