Colectivo Los Ingrávidos

Corporate mass media distorts and ruptures reality in order to uphold the violent agenda of a corrupt global elite. Colectivo Los Ingrávidos responds by distorting and rupturing mass media, thus refusing and corrupting the agenda. Their films are dazzling, rapturous, incendiary indictments of a world that has severely lost the plot. 

Consisting almost entirely of anonymous members, the Mexican, Tehuacán-based, experimental film collective Colectivo Los Ingrávidos was created in 2012 on the heels of a particularly deadly chapter in Mexico’s ongoing drug war, at a moment when protests against the government, decrying its complicity, were on the rise. Out of this mounting spirit of resistance, and the government’s commensurate exertion of repression, the collective sought to generate an alternative audiovisual ecosystem that would serve as a sorely needed counterbalance to the narrow, obfuscatory, and often blatantly deceptive officialist discourses manufactured by the state and corporate media machines. Whereas the latter excluded, and continues to exclude, the People, the work of Colectivo Los Ingrávidos was and remains expressly for the People, specifically those who are missing—the dead, the disempowered, the disarticulated, the disappeared. People who no longer exist and, people who don’t exist yet. As Gilles Deleuze wrote, “The moment the master, or the colonizer, proclaims ‘There have never been people here,’ the missing people are a becoming, they invent themselves . . . in new conditions of struggle to which a necessarily political art must contribute.” But the collective isn’t operating on an ideological level alone. They are also revolutionizing the very substrate of the moving image itself, and the way we consume it. In order to conjure the invisibilized, they are inventing a new filmic language in real time.  

Over the course of its first fourteen years, the collective has produced a staggering 586-some-odd films. Part of what renders the corpus so distinctive is the collective's melding of old and new, or more precisely, the primordial and unprecedented. Analog media like expired film stock or eroded celluloid converge with cutting-edge editing techniques like datamoshing, color inversion, fast cutting, and fractal noise (sometimes all at the same time, to vertiginous effect). Traditional music commingles with modular noise. Ancient, ancestral rites are reimagined for the computer. But the most fascinating marriage of future and past (or perhaps the suspension of both) lies in Los Ingrávidos’s signature evocation of trance. 

Contemporary hypnotists are quick to remind us that we are all already living in trance, especially the trance of social media. Every day our attention is mined for ill, and we are exposed to content designed to inure us to injustice.  But within the space of its reparative-anarchist trance, Colectivo Los Ingrávidos offers one possible antidote; Colectivo Los Ingrávidos jolts us back awake.

We affirm a shamanic materialism as audiovisual praxis, through which we might intervene, induce, and bind trance as rhythmic-corporeal seizure upon the determinability of the filmic and audiovisual material according to an eidetic, archaic, ancestral, totemic, suggestive, mythical, and infrareal differentiality.” 

Tierra en Trance (2022), a 38-minute film shot on 16mm, exemplifies this aesthetics of trance. In the opening sequence, a series of Aztec sculptures are incrementally revealed to the viewer in dizzying flashes of black and white, to the sound of Mesoamerican instruments that reproduce the cries of animals and the voices of the wind. Both the edited images and the camera itself move so rapidly that for six minutes straight the eyes are deprived of rest.

Then silence, a pause. The film returns in color. A stream of copal smoke emanates from a ceremonial incense burner guided by a hand. The rituals of ancient Gods are reflected through the center of a sunflower, along with trees, cacti, marigolds, sky. The faces of the ritual participants and the intricacies of their attire penetrate the heart of the sunflower. Then the cassette tape speeds up, or perhaps rewinds. Memory unspools. The soundtrack grows quiet. One inherits the melancholic impression of a life flashing before one’s eyes. At the film’s end, the sculptures return, only now in a riot of colorful lights, to the sounds of free jazz. Los Ingrávidos describes the film as “prelude to trance, invocation of the gods, consecration of intermittence... the trance of things gathered, fallen, yielding, pluvial, Mesoamerican wind, goddess breath, breeze of sticks, percussive woods. This is the Entranced Earth.”

In the first film of The Batalla Trilogy, Batalla (2017), we are transported to a field of marigolds. As our ears fill with the manufactured in-breaths and out-breaths of a ventilator machine, our eyes observe that the flowers seem to be breathing too, transferring energy in phantasmagorical blooms. A spectral body weaves through the field. But we are not looking at flowers, nor at a person who walks among them. We are looking at some fundamental essence of what it means to be alive.

The visual effects are so breathtaking that they render the sounds of life support beautiful. Though not explicitly addressed in the film itself, Batalla is a tribute to Aldo Gutiérrez Solano, a student who was shot in the head during the notorious mass kidnapping and shooting of 43 Ayotzinapa students in 2014. At the time of Batalla’s filming, Solano remained in a coma. In Los Ingrávidos’s words, the film stands as a testament to “the resistance of a body fighting against power.” The film feels like a prayer. But one year later, Fracking (2018) moves the trilogy in a more urgent, grating direction, depicting rapidly edited, color-inverted close-ups of dandelions and tree branches, so evocative of blood vessels and nerves, juxtaposed against the sounds of oil rigs and the machinery of global extractivism.

“Planetary battle over the porous body of the earth.” Planetary battle over all porous bodies on earth. The final installment, Tear Gas (2019), features glittering flashes of X-rays of ribcages. The sounds of labored breathing are layered and intensified until they reach an unbearable climax before finally slowing down. Together, these films comprise a meditation on the sanctity of life, the desecration of life, and the bio- and necro-politics of breathing itself. As with all of Los Ingrávidos’s films, sound design is a critical element, assigned equal if not greater importance than the visual material (both are mutually interdependent and entwined). Sound artists collaborate to nest the collective’s optical landscapes within complex symphonic (and/or discordant) cross-genre soundscapes, utilizing instruments, analog synthesizers, cassette players and everyday objects to create never-before-heard sounds. 

Much of the collective’s work is recursive. The films constantly reference one another and overlap, recycling footage from previous films, establishing connections, iterating on themselves. Thematic throughlines emerge. The oeuvre is vast, and while the films are meant to be understood relationally, in light of the whole, it can be hard to know where to begin. On the Video Data Bank, the collective offers several conceptual categories as entry points for new audiences, including Shamanic Materialism & Aesthetic of Trance, Political Cinema, Agitprop, Rituals, Hauntology Film Archives, Colonial Transfer, Make The Rich Pay For Covid 19, and more. Remarkably, the vast majority of Los Ingrávidos’s films are available to watch for free. Simply journeying to the collective’s Vimeo channel and clicking at random on the titles that most pique one’s interest yields its own adventure too. This generosity is but one emblem of the collective’s broader decentralized model of collaboration. Although their work has been widely exhibited at major museums, film festivals, and galleries around the globe, Los Ingrávidos has consistently declined institutional backing. The collective has always operated as an autonomous network, and it’s the approach that serves them best. Western notions of individual auteurism and artistic ownership, on the other hand, are superfluous to their goals.

Los Ingrávidos’s body of work is vital and necessary, and it is also often challenging to watch. The collective isn’t afraid to push the limits of perceptual tolerance or deny the spectator a comfortable viewing experience. Films like Yielding Trace (2020) constitute an epileptic’s worst nightmare. Other films feel like endurance tests. Many of the films have no legible subject. Indeed, the collective tells Hoseki that they intentionally “situate all audiovisual materials within a horizon of radical contingency, as a field of indiscernibility common to all the collective contents of the image” (emphasis ours). Very few of the films include sustained depictions of people—to the extent that Los Ingrávidos includes bodies on the screen, the bodies are presented in fragments and blinks, more spirit than solidity. Else, as is Donald Trump’s case in Monologue/Bleach (2019), the body is distorted into oblivion. The result is that we as viewers have no human likeness or looking glass to filter our own experience through, nor project our own meaning upon. In the absence of on-screen bodies, the distance between image and viewer collapses, leaving only a direct, often overwhelming, encounter. The assault is calibrated, not exploratory. While the historic avant garde left room for contemplation or aesthetic distance, Colectivo Los Ingrávidos denies this distance, producing a form of forced presence. One cannot empathize with the film, one must endure the film. 

“Considering the daily and archaic blink that interlaces movement-retention, continuous-discontinuous, dialectical opacity, numinous projectivity, and from whose pulsating invariance Mesoamerican cosmogonies extract their generative matrix,” says Los Ingrávidos, “it is from there that we reclaim the audiovisual strategies as a collective, intermittent, and impersonal intersection that, inside time and outside cinema, find in the materiality of accumulations their most radical affirmation of kinetic rapture.”

Ultimately, that is the true core of Los Ingrávidos’s work: reclamation. At a screening in Los Angeles in 2022, a member of the collective said that one of their main objectives is to recuperate the profound spirituality of their people. “Capitalism absorbs spiritualities for consumption,” she says, but the collective seeks to wrest their spirituality back; to restore a cosmovision circular in temporality and conducive to global theological thinking. Above all else, the collective aims to recover a rhythmic, percussive, ritual pulse.”

The immensity of Los Ingrávidos’s archive remains available on Vimeo. This kind of access is a real, rare gift in the midst of our increasingly paywalled world. 

If the medium is the message, then resistance is a beating drum, a beating heart, a body that insists on breathing itself. Resistance is hypnosis. Reclamation lies in agitation. 

And so the missing are revivified by a song on the wind. The song replicates itself endlessly, infinitely, demanding to be heard without needing to explain—it is a song without reason.