Colectivo Los Ingrávidos: The Sun Quartet, part 1: Piedra del Sol

 

Colectivo Los Ingrávidos—a collective of experimental filmmakers formed in Tehuacán, Mexico, in 2012—aim to create work that is both poetic and political through the medium of film. The Sun Quartet connects a contemporary traumatic event—the traumatic disappearance in 2014 of forty-three students from Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College in Iguala—to a historical moment that has been formative in shaping Mexican politics. The students were intercepted and kidnapped by local police while they were travelling to Mexico City to commemorate the Tlatelolco massacre, in which students protesting the 1968 Summer Olympics were slaughtered by the Mexican military.

Across its four parts (the first part of which we present here), the film refrains from didacticism, instead combining elements of collage, superimposed cinematography, and poetic texts to highlight Mexico’s national shame while speaking on the paradoxical nature of truth.

The video’s first movement, Piedra da Sol, shares its name with an Aztec artifact believed to date to the fifteenth century, referencing the eternal circle of life mirrored by the rotations of Earth and stations of the cosmos and standing as a symbol of Indigenous endurance in the face of Spanish conquest.

The Sun Quartet by Colectivo Los Ingrávidos is part of the main exhibition of the Wiener Festwochen 2024 curated by Inke Arns and Andrea Popelka. The exhibition entitled Comrade Sun can be seen at Kunsthalle Wien from May 17 (until September 1, 2024). More: https://kunsthallewien.at/en/exhibition/genossin-sonne/

Selected by Inke Arns (HMKV)

 

Colectivo Los Ingrávidos

Colectivo Los Ingrávidos is a group of independent artists who experiment with documentary approaches and found footage. Their goal is to challenge the commercialization of audiovisual creativity and the tedium of conventional television and cinema production. Colectivo Los Ingrávidos arose as a resistance movement and collective action that began cooperating amid major protests against the Mexican government, reporting through an anonymous YouTube channel for fear of retaliation. To work collaboratively is a political decision to deconstruct the artist-centered neoliberal order in which the object’s value and the author’s intention are at the focus of critical debate. It was necessary to operate as an anonymous collective as Mexico is the second-deadliest country in the world for journalists after Syria (according to Reporters Without Borders.) Los Ingrávidos’ work must be understood in light of their collective roots, collaborative production process, and decentralized approach to content and form. Their radical visual sound experiments and relational approach are methods for dismantling audiovisual ideological paradigms. Their films capture the urgency, immediacy, and energy of direct political action, thereby presenting a common critical space.

More on the collective:

Instagram: @zonaingravida