Michael O’Pray Writing Prize

The Screen is a Drum

E De Zulueta explores the delirious resistance of Mexican filmmakers Colectivo los ingrávidos

Colectivo los ingrávidos, El nido del Sol, 2021

I open my eyes to the flowering tip of a cactus, a screaming skull, a soft purple landscape, the sun darkening the sky, slicing the flesh of a watermelon, a red flag of rage, orange light bleeding into frame, a protest, eyelids fluorescing, an offering to the gods, a crime scene, the beating of a drum, eyes as holes burning into the screen.

It was in this disturbed euphoric state that I first encountered the films of Colectivo los ingrávidos, the ‘collective of the weightless’. Based in Mexico’s central city of Tehuacán, the collective, which originated as a resistance movement, produce films using 16mm, found footage and digital montage. Their works evoke an ecstatic, shamanic and hypnotic communion with the materiality of celluloid, distilling a desire for the resistance to corruption, violence, misogyny and militarism that rules Mexico and its institutions. By inhabiting the ways in which narco-neoliberalism and the residues of colonial violence are manifested in contemporary Mexico, the collective makes visible globalised systems of domination.

In my initial correspondence with members of the group, they asked: ‘Is it possible to reimagine the filming process as an alchemical process of trance? Can we recover cinema as an artistic practice that invokes agency within the ruins of coloniality?’ It is only with the distance of time that the nuances these questions hold have become clearer to me; the films of Los ingrávidos invite us to move away from any reducible summations towards a more profound way of understanding.

Los ingrávidos’s works powerfully evoke the presence of the dead; the disappeared frequently appear as vital forces, summoning Achille Mbembe’s statement that ‘necropolitical power proceeds by a sort of inversion between life and death, as if life was merely death’s medium’. Río San Juan, 2017, the second chapter of the four-part work The Sun Quartet, is the group’s response to the disappearance of the 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College in 2014 by Mexican security forces who were working in collusion with criminal gangs. There is a restless rhythm in the film – like the titular river itself, where the remains of two of the missing students were found, disposed in plastic bags. The film includes 16mm footage that Los ingrávidos shot at a protest rally organised by the families of those who were forcibly taken: the angrily frenetic montage superimposes crowds, landscapes, protest banners, flowers, fruit and flames. At points, the film threatens to dissolve into the blank blue of the river itself, while the protesters assert their demand: ‘Because they took them alive / we want them back alive!’ The disappeared are named one by one, the crowd responding to each utterance with a unified call of ‘present’.

A similar invocation is performed in Impressions for a Light and Sound Machine, 2014, in which the poet María Rivera, reading at a protest march in Mexico City in 2011, is heard over a fragment of damaged celluloid from La perla, 1947, a film that belongs to Mexico’s so-called golden age of cinema. Rivera’s voice summons the victims of the systemic violence caused by the war on drugs: ‘Here they come, the beheaded, the handless, the dismembered, the women whose coccyx were smashed, the men whose heads were crushed, the little children crying between dark walls of minerals and sand.’ As her list continues, the monochrome images are slashed, scratched and shredded, warping and melting as if the film were on fire. This material degradation produces an intense sense of rupture, one that reflects the trauma and absence of the victims: ‘There they come, the dead – so lonely, so silent, so ours.’ This interminable list is overtaken only by the noise of the projector and the total disintegration of the film.

Rivera’s words are from her poem ‘Los Muertos’, which Los ingrávidos describe as a ‘documentary poem’, a seemingly paradoxical definition that challenges orthodox ways in which truth and testimony might be recorded. I ask Los ingrávidos: ‘How can creative practices produce meaningful acts of witnessing?’, they tell me that they ‘conceive the production of significant acts of testimony in the context of an audiovisual and film praxis that vindicates the convergence of knowledge, traditions, mobilisations and protests’. In opposition to the controlling regimes of media production, described by Los ingrávidos as ‘aesthetic-television-cinematic corporativism’, the group is ‘forced to find new forms and testimonial materials that provoke arrhythmias and states of trance’.

In response to the continued ‘explosion of unrestrained and hyper-specialised violence’ in Mexico, the Tijuana activist Sayak Valencia has developed the term ‘gore capitalism’. The term, which borrows from the genre of horror cinema, describes the extreme violence, the dismemberment and mutilation of bodies that frequently occurs in Mexico. Valencia’s term offers a conceptual framing for Los ingrávidos’s Femicide Trilogy, 2016–17, a work which focuses on the longstanding misogyny and murder of women in Mexico. The first film in the trilogy, Coyolxauhqui, 2016, reactivates the myth of the eponymous Aztec moon goddess, who was dismembered by her brother, and situates the myth alongside contemporary femicides. The film is shot in La Mixteca, the location of numerous maquiladoras that have been tied to a wave of gendered violence across Mexico. Since the 1990s, hundreds of female factory workers have either gone missing or been murdered while travelling to or from these foreign-owned manufacturing facilities. The women’s economic and physical vulnerability is continually exploited by intersecting structures of violence, structures that are underpinned by globalised, extractive capitalism. The workers here can be considered among the ‘living dead’ of Mbembe’s ‘death-worlds’; the women are defined by their proximity to death and death-making conditions. The film responds to this unique topography of cruelty by performing a dance between camera and landscape, a frenetic beat builds with the voices of women lamenting the myth of Coyolxauhqui. We return from a haunted purple sky to the dusty ground where we find abandoned shoes, underwear, bones. The camera predatorily moves over the scenes it depicts, circling and seizing on items again and again; as viewers, we follow these movements that trace our complicity in this horror.

As tools for understanding their work, Los ingrávidos offer the twinned concepts of the ‘aesthetics of trance’ and ‘shamanic materialism’, which is produced, in the group’s words, through ‘fragments, ruptures, loops, clusters, drifts, ascents, descents, series and folds’. Here the screen functions as a ‘shamanic drum’, a taut membrane on which new cosmologies are invoked. As the filmmaker Stephen Broomer observes: ‘[their] dense superimpositions offer a striking ontology, that such a wild overlapping of images is truer to perception than traditional composition.’ This is intensely felt in Tonalli, 2021, a film in which a hypnagogic state is produced by a wild syncopation of colour and beats: a pink moon erupts like an aperture or spotlight, skidding around the surface. It splits and multiplies across a shock of fluorescing flowers, grinning skulls and deities that flash out from the darkness, everything accelerating towards a climactic moment of dissolution, the black hole of a retina, an eclipse. The sonic and visual density of the work, its granularity and sensuality, all produce a deep impression of excess. This excess evokes the philosopher Franco ‘Bifo’ Berrardi’s conception of poetry, which he describes as ‘going beyond the limits of language, which is to say the limits of the world itself … Excessiveness is the condition of revelation, of emancipation from established meaning and of the disclosure of an unseen horizon of signification: the possible’. The poetics of Los ingrávidos are sharply wielded, insisting on the possibility of other worlds.

The preoccupation with the natural world in Los ingrávidos’s films – with flowers, fruit, maize, agrarian landscapes, the sun, the moon – is core to their purpose and ties their conception of shamanic trance to their political project, linking the conditions of colonial extractivism and present-day ecocide with wider themes of political violence and exploitation. The group describes its ‘animistic penetration’ of the landscape as seeking to uncover visions of a pre-Hispanic Mexico: a Mesoamerican landscape that is treated not as raw material to be further exploited, but rather ingrained with transcendental meaning. This is a cinematic process of restoration, a radical resurgence of ritual and the sacred, ‘this is the Earth in a trance’.

E De Zulueta is an awardee of the Film and Video Umbrella and Art Monthly Michael O’Pray Prize 2024.

The Michael O’Pray Prize is a Film and Video Umbrella initiative in partnership with Art Monthly, supported by University of East London and Arts Council England.

2024 Selection Panel

• Terry Bailey, senior lecturer, programme leader, Creative and Professional Writing, University of East London
• Alice Hattrick, writer, lecturer and author of ‘Ill Feelings’
• Ghislaine Leung, Turner Prize-nominated artist
• Chris McCormack, associate editor, Art Monthly
• Angelica Sule, director, Film and Video Umbrella