Tierra en Trance and The Sun Quartet
April 1–30, 2023
e-flux Film is very pleased to present two films by Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, Tierra en Trance and The Sun Quartet, as the April 2023 edition of our monthly series Staff Picks.
Watch the films here.
Tierra en Trance (2022, 38 minutes)
These are the dancing bodies in agitated rapture: a prelude to trance, invocation of the gods, consecration of intermittence. Here our point of view sparkles under the spell and trance of things gathered, fallen, yielding, pluvial. Mesoamerican wind, goddess breath, breeze of sticks, percussive woods. Here the audiovisual diagram that guides us, the kinetic breath that inspires us, the serpentine spear that snatches us away, the agitated plumes that tremble at us. Here are the sounds and rumbles of Teponaztli, a Mesoamerican percussive instrument: serpentine, dancing, bouncing sticks, trunks, branches, and wood. Kinetic and audiovisual serialism from the embers of the Earth. This is the entranced Earth.
The Sun Quartet (2017, 60 minutes)
The Sun Quartet is a solar composition in four movements, a political composition in four natural elements, an audiovisual composition in four bodily mutations: a sun stone where youth blooms in protest, a river overflowing the streets, the burning plain rising in the city. And, finally, the clamor of the people that shook Mexico after the night of September 26, 2014. The disappearance of 43 students from Ayotzinapa opened a breach in the Mexican political body.
Colectivo Los Ingrávidos was founded in Tehuacán Mexico in 2012 to dismantle the commercial and corporate audiovisual grammar and its embedded ideology. The collective is inspired by the historical avant-gardes and their commitment to using both form and content against alienating realities. Their methods combine digital and analogue mediums, interventions on archival materials, agitprop, mythology, social protests, and documentary poetry. Their radical experimentations in documentary and cinematography produce visual and auditory impressions that are political possibilities in their own right. Their work has been exhibited internationally, including at the 2019 Whitney Biennial, the Bienal de la Imagen Movimiento in Buenos Aires, International Film Festival Rotterdam, RIDM Montreal International Documentary Festival, Images Festival; Media City Film Festival, Ambulante Cine Documental, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, and Festival Internacional de Cine FILMADRID among many others. Their collection of poetry Solares was published by Evidence Press at the Centre for Expanded Poetics (Montréal, 2018).
About the series
Staff Picks is a monthly streaming series on e-flux Film of staff picks and recommended videos designed to disrupt the monotony of an algorithm. Before the end times of big data, we used to discover suggested content along dusty shelves in video rental stores, where Post-it notes scribbled by shift workers implored us to experience the same movies that made them guffaw, scream, or weep. Sometimes the content bored us, sometimes it overwhelmed us, and sometimes, as if by magic, it was just right. e-flux invites you to relive this rental store mode of perusal, with personalized picks curated through judgment that does not take into consideration your viewing history.
For more information, contact program [at] e-flux.com.