Ancestralidad y trance

The ongoing collaboration between the Mexican film collective Colectivo los Ingrávidos (Teuhacán) and curator Almudena Escobar López (Galicia) understands cinema as a ritual practice capable of colliding the empirical with the shamanic. They propose connective spaces of acute awareness and deep listening that challenge traditional cinematic structures of viewing. Foregrounding the structural qualities of images as a political gesture, the project proposes a cinematic trance of history, myth, and embodiment that bridges the ancestral to the avant-garde. Poetry becomes a form of documentation for those who are invisible to the state, home movies filmed by tourists invoke ancestral snakes, police footage is superimposed with burnt film archives and colonial archives become physically asphyxiating. This multilayered cinematic ritual connects ancestral omens with the present, culminating in a filmic hallucinatory trance that deals with 500 years of plundering and excess. In the choreography of thirteen short films each visual moment is a historical marker that registers the intrinsic relationship between the cinema apparatus and the colonial structures of power.

The website of “Ancestralidad y transe” gathers texts and films of the collective, among others the “Thesis on the Audiovisual” (PDF English version). Also available online is the audio recording of a conversation between Almudena Escobar López and the Colectivo Los Ingrávidos about the relationship between archives, colonialism and image-making. The conversation was conducted in Spanish. A transcript is available in English.