Colectivo Los Ingrávidos: Shamanic Materialism & Aesthetic Of Trance

Altares is an audiovisual shrine composed of small temples that contain images of ancient deities.

This is the invocation to the gods, the incense to the gods. A kinetic dance to the gods. Behold the hieratic nature of Tonatiuh (The Sun) and the ferocity of Tlaltecuhtli (Goddess of the Earth) raising her agitation from the white smoke of the burned Copalli, Mesoamerican aromatic resin, sacred resin that tears celluloid with smoke, white hair, on the dark background of the world.

Coyolxauhqui recasts the mythical dismemberment of the Aztec Moon goddess Coyolxauhqui by her brother Huitzilopochtli, the deity of war, the Sun and human sacrifice. The film is a poem of perception, one that unveils how contemporary Mexican femicide is linked to a patriarchal history with roots in deeper cultural constructs.

This is the howl, gaze, and agitation of the Coyote into the mountain. The Path of the Coyote.

In Danza Solar, Super8 archival footage of dancers is superimposed with 16mm views of the sun (suns). The film evokes a communal solar trance, both Andean and Mesoamerican. Part of a collection of works the collective considers "Shamanic Materialism," Danza Solar is a Mesoamerican spell unleashed.

A brief glimpse into the cycles of Coyolxauhqui, the moon goddess, whose cycles used to be a dance. A fast-paced jazz soundtrack accompanies the quick, darting movements of the moon.

In the nest of the sun, Xolotl, Huitzilin and Xochitl meet to recover the dance of radiation, whose colorful heat stirs the new fire of their cosmic dance. Part of the Film Tonalli.

The Pyramid used to be a mountain.

"In the film, images of plants, rocks and occasional mountaintops flicker by so quickly they almost evade perception. Extreme colour-tinted close-ups and the use of a rhythmic, drum-forward jazz soundtrack create an effect of a syncopated collage of geometric forms. The collective seems to call into question the audience’s ability to ascertain the significance – whether historical or geographical – of the vaguely identified, eroded sites presented."

–Ela Bittencourt, Frieze

At this time even the flowery wars are ready to begin and the flowery atavism begins to flash. The flowers, the skulls, the moon and the sun are ready for the sacrificial trance. Part of Tonalli.

Irradiation is the thermal emanation of vital heat, the ancestral support that immerses beings in the solar blood. This is the immersion of beings in the bloody solar flow that gives the intense color of our present time. Part of Tonalli.

The scales of the snake refract a trance and invocation. In the epicenter, the pyramids join Izcóatl's battle, the Obsidian Serpent propagates an exhortation: all the dances against the war.

This title is also available on the compilation What Was Always Yours and Never Lost.

Lumbreras is the historical and archeological place of the bones, ruins and detritus. A window thought time, an ancestral rhythm of the audiovisual materials.

This is the invocation to the ancestral god of the underworld, the ancient annihilator, which preserves the ritual inertia of the bones and stones.

This is the gaze that is reflected in the dark obsidian mirror.

Polished obsidian mirrors, tezcatl, were once used in ancient Mexico for divination, to traverse into the worlds of the gods and ancestors.

Through the obsidian mirror, the solar and lunar ritual used to be a celestial dance. In Ritual, suns and moons whirl around, glowing brighter as their paths cross.

Sensemayá is a shamanic composition, an ecstatic dance, and ritualistic spell which distills and exudes the kinetic motion of the ancient snake that inhabits our present dislocated times. Shifting from the poetic to the unsettling and the foreboding, Sensemayá contorts and repeats its patterns, pulsating images that feel out of time, encompassing the past, the present and the future.

In the center of the rising Temple, the history, myth, ancestral and infrareal combine their rhythms into the cycle life of ritual cinema. Trance and shamanic visions arise into the ancient Teocalli.  

These are the dancing bodies in an agitated rapture: prelude to trance, invocation of the gods, consecration of intermittence. Here our point of view sparkles under the spell and trance of things gathered, fallen, yielding, pluvial, Mesoamerican wind, goddess breath, breeze of sticks. percussive woods.

Tlecáxitl is the sacred furnace where the new fire begins. This is the place where the sun, the moon and fire coincide in their cosmic dance to unleash vital irradiation. Part of Tonalli.

“Drawing on the ancient Nahuatl concept of the animating soul or life force, Tonalli engages the ritualistic powers of the cinema, summoning fire, flowers, and many moons into a frenetic and mesmerizing in-camera collage. Here, amid thickly swirling images and textured abstractions, the gods of creation and fertility manifest, dissolving into iridescent colors and dense, corporeal rhythms.” NYFF59

Part of shamanic materialism and the aesthetic of trance. 

We are still here. We the birds. Part of hauntology Film Archives and shamanic materialism. 

This is a rhythmic invocation of the ancestral fire, in which dazzling flames reanimate bones and natural elements. This is the shining of color.