Los Ingrávidos

Images in a trance: from the ritual to the political

“How can centuries turn, or hearts turn, without anyone asking where all the Indigenous people have gone?” — Natalie Diaz

“We have to speak, write, perform, act, bewitch, because when it comes to art, for us Indigenous peoples, the work is not enough. In fact, we are on a great and perhaps definitive quest through the dominant world to compose the genesis of one more full passage — from collective unconsciousness to our substitution for other supra-existential experiences.” — Jaider Esbell

The meaning of trance (“transe”), in the sense our society agrees on, can be understood in two ways: the first, as an altered state of consciousness, in which someone finds themselves in an abstraction of what we recognise as reality; the second refers to critical juncture, a moment of crisis. It is through the experience of trance, in both senses, that we gain access to the work of Colectivo Los Ingrávidos (Tehuacán, Mexico). In this programme, the selected works are divided into Political Cinema and Shamanic Visions. The chosen films draw together significant features that point to the revolutionary character of their artistic practice.

In the first part, trance as a crisis is presented in the self-described Political Cinema of Agitation, in which they denounce systemic violence in all its forms. The aspects of these works that come through most strongly reveal a determinant element of their aesthetic: the People. In its thesis on the audiovisual, the Colectivo indicates three political dimensions of the people: the Supposed People, the Missing People and the Population. And it denounces the way that media representation, manipulated by corporate governments, is a means of excluding the People and modelling its own image so that the Supposed People and Missing People can be transformed into Population. In the films ¿Has visto?, Impressions for a Light and Sound Machine and The Sun Quartet (the latter split into four parts), we are shown the violence of this operation through deeply poetic texts that denounce collective trauma. Besides voices, there are tones, images and absences (this latter as an aesthetic-political choice to evoke and make present the Missing People). Another strategic approach sees them appropriate documentary images that originate from restrictive media representations, in order to intervene and give them autonomy, reaffirming their identities beyond the image shaped by the Population.

In Shamanic Visions, ancient cosmic narratives are mobilised in parallel with powerful texts made up of hypnotising images. Ancestral artefacts come together with the elements of fire and earth, the visual narrative ritualising an evocation of the sacred. The cinematic experience also interrogates the ritual process of trance. The Indigenous Colectivo announces its “shamanic materialism”, which, in brief, deals, in its material form, with the contingency of an image’s content in its autophagic relationship, while at the same time fracturing its temporality. This leads to the shamanic element, where audiovisual material is connected to the onset of trance through interventions, textures and rhythms that cause a kind of sensory overload, presenting an ontology that is, above all else, ancestral.

In its films, Los Ingrávidos mobilises a forceful political resistance, by derailing the hegemonic logic of thinking about an image separately from its spiritual or ritualistic form; on the contrary, they dismantle, subvert and re-shape dominant visual narratives. In the same way, they reclaim the power and importance of cosmogony in contemporary times, bringing cinema close to the sacred, to living memory, to the social, to the political and to the ritual, in an integrated practice that points towards a new way of reclaiming Indigenous presence in image production.