Colonial transfer

Inspired by the historical avant-gardes, Los Ingrávidos grasp their filmmaking as a sociopolitical practice which emerges via interventions into film and archive material, as well as engagement with mythologies, agitprop and social protests. This second programme places a focus on the large number of femicides, murders and kidnappings carried out by the police and the military in Mexico while also examining the traces left behind in (Western) ways of thinking by European and American campaigns of conquest. In Aztec mythology, Coyolxauhqui refers to the goddess of the moon, who was dismembered by her half-brother. After throwing her head into the air, it has orbited the Earth as the moon ever since. The film of the same name is a staccato-edited trance poem which shows that the country’s patriarchal history is already part of the cultural constructions of the advanced Indigenous civilisations. IMPRESSIONS FOR A LIGHT AND SOUND MACHINE reworks the insistent, intense heartbreaking, indictment Los muertos by María Rivera, a poem which denounces the state’s response to violence against women, as well as against children, adolescents and men.
¿HAS VISTO?, TRANSMISSION/MISFRAMING, BATALLA und OLYMPIA are all multilayered engagements—both in conceptual and formal terms—with diferent facets of violence, its victims, and its visual representation. ¿HAS VISTO? brings transparencies of missing people’s faces to the fore, while the photographs that reveals the marks of the violence inflicted on the victims can only be heard in conversation in TRANSMISSION/MISFRAMING, accompanied by a photograph of the perpetrators carried by ants. BATALLA draws on the marigolds planted to honour those killed in a still-unexplained police and paramilitary attack on a training centre for primary school teachers in the small town of Iguala on September 26, 2014, during which 43 people “disappeared”. Student Aldo Gutiérrez Solano was one of their number and remains in a coma to this day; the sound of his respirator plays on the soundtrack. OLYMPIA shows archive images of the opening ceremony of Olympic Games through a circular frame, as the searching movements of the camera suggest we are looking through the sights of a gun. On October 2, 1958, 10 days before the ceremony, paramilitary organisations and the police suppressed protests that culminated in the Tlatelolco massacre. With elements of agitprop, artificial intelligence and computer animation, AFTER AMÉRICA, BRUSSELS and COLONIAL TRANSFER condemn the influence of colonial campaigns and popular image politics on the history of Mexico, as well as the lasting thought pattens these have implied. (Daniela Zahlner, Dietmar Schwärzler)

In cooperation with sixpackfilm, put together by Daniela Zahlner and Dietmar Schwärzler.

In the presence of a member of Colectivo Los Ingrávidos.