The process of making NANACATEPEC started some years ago, when each of us was working on different projects. Elena was filming a piece about mining in Mexico and its impact on communities and nature, it became clear how communal resistance was the only way to protect life. During this research she was able to film natural areas that are preserved by communities.
Mushrooms are the fruits of a huge network that recycles the world and strengthens the notion of inter-species community.
Azucena moved to a town South of Mexico City called Tepoztlán, where every rainy season she joins a group of mycologists and fungi enthusiasts. She began to film the sophisticated coexistence of species connected to the mycelium, and learned that mushrooms are the fruits of this huge network that recycles the world and strengthens the notion of inter-species community.
Our wanderings into these territories (usually with a 16mm camera in our hands) resulted in an important collection of images portraying nature, but more specifically mushrooms, mountains, and caves. We decided to go deeper into this coincidence, so with this very open idea we applied to a residency at Crater Lab, which is one of the six artist-run film labs with a DIY philosophy and a focus on analog film that run the SPECTRAL project.
During the previous months leading up to the residency we started a “fungitheque” to study the theme more thoroughly and find out how our apparently divergent interests on community and mycelium were interconnected. We filmed more images, now putting together our views and ideas. We wanted to build an imaginary place called Nanacatepec (mountain of mushrooms in nahuatl), a huge rock that hosts caves and mushrooms, communicating both below and above the earth with living and dead beings. Some poetry around the powerful mycelium and its fruits, in the form of mushrooms, as creators and transformers of everything in the world.
We spent one month in Barcelona hand printing/developing and building the piece together with musician Tomás Novoa.
The result is this 45-minute expanded cinema piece that will be performed live for the first time at Berlinale Forum Expanded.
