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The Sun Quartet, Part 3: Conflagration

Colectivo Los Ingrávidos

2017 00:16:22 MexicoSpanishColorStereo4:316mm film
Tags:
Activism , Art Collective , City , Colectivo Los Ingrávidos: The Sun Quartet , Crime or Violence , Experimental Film , Latino/Chicano , Politics , Post-colonialism

Description

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.

"The Sun Quartet confronts the climate of corruption and violence that dominates contemporary Mexican leadership and militarism. Across its four parts, the series exemplifies the poetic operations of the collective, who reconcile elements ranging from improvisational music, superimposed cinematography, poetic texts both read and cast on screen, and documentation of protests. These elements assemble as a counter to official claims to truth regarding traumas as recent as the 2014 disappearance of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa rural normal school that happened in Iguala, Mexico, and as distant as the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre, a formative event in contemporary Mexican revolutionary consciousness. The Sun Quartet also summons resonances of older, unspeakable traumas, more distant still, rifts that recede deep into the past of Mexico, its genocides and massacres, the predation done in its name, its significance as a theatre to colonial ambitions. The Sun Quartet mixes phenomenological fascination with the terrifying climate of contemporary Mexican governance and the historical foundations of that terror." 

–Stephen Boomer, "Revelations by Sunlight: Colectivo los ingrávidos’ The Sun Quartet," Cinema Scope, Issue 91 (2022).

This title is also available as part the compilation The Sun Quartet. 

About Colectivo Los Ingrávidos

For an overview of the Colectivo Los Ingrávidos Collection and its subcollections, please visit the Colectivo Los Ingrávidos Collection Guide.

Colectivo Los Ingrávidos (Tehuacán) is a Mexican film collective founded 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 analog mediums, interventions on archival materials, mythology, agitprop, social protests, and documentary poetry. Their radical experimentations on documentary and cinematographic devices produce images, both visual and auditory that are political possibilities in their own right.  

The collective creates vivid and sparking films and videos of protests and labor, earth and sky in explosions of sounds and images that work toward decolonizing the ways of seeing the world. Often in experimental film, heavy-handed soundtracks can often overwhelm the force of the visual; but the work of Colectivo Los Ingrávidos integrates bold sonic choices with image in a pure and purposeful unification that can be, at times, sublime.  

The work could feature an assortment of their visual styles, themes, and formats. The works vary from digitally animated arrangements of medical imagery, to pulsing ritualistic superimpositions, to delightful camera-dances with the sun and moon. It also features longer work on more focused themes, including works on political action and outrage, and one of their longer films featuring a jazzy soundtrack over lush layers of natural and poetic imagery of trees, flowers, totems, and dance. Colectivo Los Ingrávidos make some of the most striking, relevant, and rigorous work in the experimental film world today.  

Their work has played at various film festivals including Exis – Experimental Film & Video Festival in Seoul; Moscow International Experimental Film Festival, Frontera Sur Festival Internacional de no ficción (Chile), Berlin Critics´ Week, Fenda – Experimental Festival of Film Arts (Brazil), International Film Festival Rotterdam, RIDM - Montreal International Documentary Festival, Media City Film Festival,  Images Festival; Punto de Vista Festival Internacional de Cine Documental de Navarra, Costa Rica Festival Internacional de Cine: CRFIC, MUTA Festival Internacional de Apropiación Audiovisual (Peru), FICValdivia – Festival Internacional de Cine de Valdivia, Uppsala Kortfilfestival, Midbo – Muestra Internacional Documental de Bogotá, Strangloscope (Brazil), The Florida Experimental Film/Video Festival, CROSSROADS, BFI London Film Festival, Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival, Experimental film festival Process, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Festival Internacional de Cine FILMADRID, SEEYOUSOUND – International Music Film Festival (Turin), Festival Internacional de Cine Contemporáneo Cámara Lúcida (Ecuador), Camden International Film Festival, ALTERNATIVE FILM/VIDEO (Belgrade), ULTRAcinema – Experimental Cinema, Ambulante Cine Documental, Onion City Experimental Film Festival, Chicago Underground Film Festival, Festival Internacional de CineMigrante (Buenos Aires), SGIFF Singapore International Film Festival, EXPERIMENTA Experimental Film & Moving Image Art in India, STAB THE ARCHIVE | طعناً بالأرشيف aashra – Ashkal Alwan.  

Their work was at the Museum of Modern Art as part of their Modern Mondays series, Tate Modern Film Series, The Block Museum, Conversation at the Edge- Gene Siskel Film forum, Museum of the Moving Image, 2022 The Flaherty Film Seminar, 2019 Whitney Biennial, and the Bienal de la Imagen Movimiento in Buenos Aires (BIM). They were part of the 2018 Flaherty NYC Winter-Spring Series Common Visions, La Clef Revival – “Filmer collectif” Paris, Harvard Film Archives, Filmform The Art Film & Video Archive Stockholm, Munchmuseet i Bevegelse - Kunsthall Oslo, Kunshal Gent Belgium, M WOODS Museum in Beijing China.  

They were awarded: Honorable Mention “Ancestral” at Fenda - International Film Festival- Belo Horizonte, Brasil; Kodak Award at MIFF - Moscow International Experimental Film Festival 2021; Jury Award at Media City Film Festival; the Youth Award at Punto de Vista-Spain; the Marian McMahon Akimbo Award at the 2018 Images Film Festival, and the Norberto Griffa award to Latin-American Audiovisual Creation at the 2014 and 2016 BIM. Their recent collection of poetry SOLARES was published by Evidence Press at the Centre for Expanded Poetics (Montréal) and Thesis on the Audiovisual will be published (London-Paris).

See Also: Colectivo Los Ingrávidos: An Interview