“Nothing Needs To Exist”: In Conversation with Colectivo Los Ingrávidos

Many worlds are walked in the world.
Many worlds are made. Many worlds make us […]
The world we want is a world where many worlds fit.

– Fourth Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle, Zapatista Army of National Liberation¹ 

On June 30, 2014, members of the Mexican military executed 22 civilians in Tlatlaya – including two minors – in what was initially framed as a legitimate clash with presumed criminals. A subsequent investigation by Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission, however, revealed a far murkier operation: between 12 and 15 of the victims were killed arbitrarily, extra-juridically, and under orders intended to stage the massacre as self-defence. In the face of this grotesque political distortion, and the silence that followed, Colectivo Los Ingrávidos responded with an audiovisual work that did not request transparency but sought to agitate the very foundations of institutional discourse. Their short film Transmission/Deframing, released on their website shortly after the events, appears deceptively minimal: a single black-and-white take in which a photograph of uniformed soldiers (one holding the Mexican flag) is slowly overtaken by a swarm of ants. Resting on dry and cracked earth, the image is gradually pushed beyond the frame to reveal a dark hole beneath it. Here, the ants do not destroy; they displace – not with force, but with collective persistence, as Federico Windhausen notes in “Deframing Evidence”.² In this quiet gesture, the film performs a matterphoric³ excavation of the state’s apparatus to reveal what festers under the surface. 

Transmisión / Desencuadre

Founded in late 2011 between Mexico City and Tehuacán, Puebla, Los Ingrávidos emerged within a broader climate of social protest and state repression in Mexico – one marked by the resurgence of student movements and the erosion of democratic rights. While rooted in the urgency of local struggles, the collective’s audiovisual interventions have since taken on a translocal and transductive form: a corpus of hundreds of short films made freely available via their Vimeo channel. The collective’s aesthetic is often raw and flickering, combining degraded textures, saturated colours, and overlaid sounds that work to fracture dominant perceptual imagery. True to their name (meaning “those without gravity”) Los Ingrávidos rejects any form of institutional anchoring. With the exception of sound artist Danavi Varillas, who occasionally acts as a public interlocutor, the collective’s members remain all unnamed. This refusal of individual authorship can be read as a protective tactic – a strategic response to political violence comparable to the anonymous practices of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional in Chiapas. Yet, it also operates as a deliberate critique of Western notions of the auteur and artistic ownership. In defiance of the market-driven, globalised, and artist-centred logic of cultural production, Los Ingrávidos centre its audiovisual practice in collaboration, anonymity, and locality. 

The collective’s praxis also finds its theoretical counterpart in their 77 Thesis on the Audiovisual (2021), a manifesto that rejects a cinema of exposition and the didacticism of militant politics in favour of one of agitation and trance. “Shamanic materialism,” they call it: a funerary cinema that does not represent the “missing people” (in a Deleuzian sense) or desaparecidos in Mexico but invokes them. “Shamanic possession is the sensory outburst of the political cinema of agitation” (Thesis 13). This is not a call for justice in the liberal sense, but a politics of conjuration. (In Spanish, hechizo means both “spell” and “artifice,” a dual meaning that lies at the heart of cinema itself and of what the colectivo does with this medium.) In place of testimony, ritual. In place of visibility, vibration:

Shamanic materialism proceeds by fragments, ruptures, loops, clusters, modules, drifts, ascents, descents, series, spirals, vortexes, pulses, rhythms, entropy, negentropy, hypostasis, collisions, linkages, aberrations, folds, burials, unearthings, and everything which reveals intermittent constellations, and from whose magma figures, agitations, forms, structures, processes, relationships, perceptions, speculations, and sensations emerge. Shamanic materialism is a Mesoamerican spell unleashed. (Thesis 24)

Coyolxauhqui

Despite screenings at international festivals and exhibitions, the colectivo’s primary allegiance lies elsewhere: in the slow, porous temporality of grassroots circulation and in the building of counter-infrastructures that privilege free access, poetic renewal, and aesthetic dissensus.⁴ This is, as they suggest, a political cinema made politically – one that does not seek to explain, but to unsettle and agitate.

What follows is a conversation with Colectivo Los Ingrávidos and the impulses that animate their practice: from the refusal of representation to the insistence on ritual; from sound as weapon to cinema as invocation.

* * * *

The name of the collective refers to Valeria Luiselli’s novel Los ingrávidos,⁵ which deals with stories marked by displacement, the blending of languages and cultures, and the passage between the visible and the spectral. What relationship do you see between that notion of weightlessness and your audiovisual work?

We believe that names are everything that rises, although in a certain sense what is most intriguing is the absent, unseen depth of that ascent – captured in growls, distortions, nesting, filtered through electric-digital entrails that grind down the possibility of a world, names returned to obscure processes of gestation. We speak of a return to distortion. The copy nests the invisible, the simulacrum infests the audible, appearance plunders the intangible, and the formless core of violence sets in motion the perennial machine of annihilation, which is none other than the motionless machine of birth. We are rubble for those forces, archives of contingency, effluvia of names across plates of disarticulated audio-vision. Beyond violence, nothing remains but the name. From there comes the collective, from there the name. And of course, we also always keep in mind – always present – the weightless and subtle verses of Machado in Serrat’s song.

Your first short, Transmission/Deframing, responded directly to the 2014 Tlatlaya massacre and its institutional cover-up. Rather than depicting the crime, you move toward a plane that mediates on the unrepresentable. How do you recall that formative moment for the collective? How have your approaches changed since those early intersections of politics, performance, and the audio-visual disjunctions shaping your relation to memory and violence?

In Mexico, shifts in political regimes have continually structured an entire social, cultural, and economic policy, materialising concretely in the six-year cycles of government. This is important because each administration has produced an audiovisual machinery with a sharply defined profile and propagandistic angle that impacts and restructures the media, discursive, and semiotic iconostasis of society. The gigantic semiotic domes erected by governments every six years – onto which governmental imaginaries are projected – have ranged from the violence bound up with the formless war on drugs, to massive and overwhelming media saturation, to the touristic instrumentalisation of a bureaucratically marked indigenismo. In any case, the space of media representation that corporate governments construct around themselves excludes the People. What these governments assume as the correlate of their own transpopular image is a “population” – a mass to be administered, quantified, managed. The consistency of that representational space is entirely homogeneous, overdetermined, quantified, and non-antagonistic. The determining dimension of officialist discourses seeks to model a total, coherent image that would once and for all replace or transform the absent people into a missing people – presumed transfigured into population. What the empire of governmental images presupposes is a spectator-population, or a population-in-waiting: a distracting-digestive aggregate that, in unison, avoids the questions: What lies behind the images and audiovisual productions of governmental or corporate power? Or rather, to what expectant totality are the monstrous stagings continuously undertaken by global corporate governments and their tele-informatic mercenary allies addressed – stagings waged against every possible construction and articulation of missing peoples? The quantified, subjugated, and intimidated mass responds to these questions voicelessly, from the tribune of atomisation – it responds as population. Behind the images-sounds disseminated by corporate-cinema and state-cinema, behind the hegemonic enthronement of sovereign-mercenary-corporate mannequins, there exists an ideal spectator: a regulated population without a clear political territory, in a desolate atmosphere of insecurity, shifted into a vertiginous aesthetic-political uprooting.

Although your work is often situated within the field of experimental cinema, many of your films also operate according to a more ritualistic logic. In your manifesto, you speak of the need to summon an encounter between the world of the living and that of the dead, and to rebind an existence fractured by violence. How do you conceive of this shamanic dimension?

There are two revolutionary paradigms within the audiovisual that sustain our poetic resolution: the ritual paradigm – that is, the conception of the rite as a metaphysical extension of rhythm – and the political paradigm – that is, the intermittent fluctuation of the contingent.

Through these paradigms, which interlace our filmic praxis, we seek to recover work around the audiovisual as a seizure of pictorial-luminous-audio-tactile experimentation, positing the radical community between, on the one hand, the ritual form of cinema’s projective experimentation, and on the other, the liminal grids of perceptual accumulation that shimmer with contingency. Considering the archaic and everyday flicker that interweaves movement-retention, continuum-discontinuum, dialectical opacity, numinous projectivity – and from whose pulsing invariance Mesoamerican cosmogonies draw their generative matrix – it is from there that we reclaim audiovisual praxis as a cumulative, intermittent, and impersonal intersection that, within time and beyond cinema, finds in the materiality of accumulations its most radical affirmation of kinesthetic rapture. We thus seek to recover the rhythmic, percussive, and ritual pulse that, from the apparent inert mass of accumulated materials, allows the exuberant song of audiovisual sequences to bloom.

In some interviews you have noted that your films should not be understood as isolated works, but rather as modular components of a broader audiovisual body – something like Warburg’s Atlas Mnemosyne in which disparate temporalities and visual repertoires coexist: Mesoamerican mythologies, colonial maps, hauntologies, genocides, the Anthropocene, etc. How do you understand this serial practice as a formal strategy?

We can think of our formal method as pareidolic devotion, cumulative praxidermis, crystallographic grids, mineralised intellects, organic morphologies, modulable polymers, cultic symbols, commutable allegories, objectual orientations, semiotic circuits, grey noise, sinusoidal fibres, smoking roots, sonic aqueousness, texturologies, assemblages, reliquaries, syllogisms, background radiation, negative dialectics, conceptual residues, intracranial mantras, infrasonic cults, paleolithic rubble, ideal retentions, liminal sections, totemic pulses, eroded pyramids, untimely retractions, binding animisms, fangs, relics, faces in seeds, eyeballs, amulets, bones, shadow. Spaced transparencies. Psychotic hyperbole.

Roger Odin⁶ proposes the idea of an “energetic mode” of audiovisual reception, where the spectator does not follow a dramatic narrative arc but rather vibrates with intensive-images⁷ on a more sensory or rhythmic plane. Would you say that in your films there is a kind of energetic narrative – as a way of making sense through intensity, vibration, repetition, and audio-visual disjunction?

Indeed, we consider that the composition of images, as well as the movement between them, fundamentally implies the in-camera linking of intervals at multiple speeds per second; the structural variation of the optical diaphragm; the intensity and imbalance of light provided by the colours and shades summoned through illumination; the interpolation of different types of optics and focal lengths upon the image track; as well as multiple filmic layers that emerge through in-camera superimposition – all of this summoned and mobilised by the motivic materiality that precipitates us into the intermittent continuity of our sequential manifestos.

It is important to note that the pareidolic devotion coursing through our eruptive disarrays makes the organising axis of our audiovisual compositions not a single axis but rather the decentred, prismatic flow of luminous beams as they traverse the structural accumulations of the frame. We continually seek the ritual and liturgical circumscription of the accumulated material motif with the intention of displacing intentionality toward horizontal systems of circulation and intermittence that, flowing toward the camera, germinate the frame, the shot, and the intervals between them.

Your work is often described as embodying an intercultural or mestizo charge, where ancestral knowledge, the colonial archive, and television culture intersect and contaminate one another. How do you understand the relationship between staging and historical memory? In what ways does montage navigate these tensions? 

We consider montage as a form of irruption, a beginning that subverts according to a strategic indeterminacy – that is, we understand montage as initiatory, insofar as it provides us absolute access to the time of staging and the space of historical memory. We speak of disarticulated bodies across wastelands of fluctuation. Animist montage, conceived in this way, is the indeterminate immediate: immediacy as the form of irruption, while indeterminacy is our material of improvisation, our mode of accumulating and transposing the random, the contingent, the vulnerable. It is no surprise, then, that montage should be the very battlefield of every audiovisual politics.

In Theses on the Audiovisual, you affirm that you make films for “a people who are missing,” a la Deleuze. These are people who do not yet exist, but whose image or enunciation must be provoked. I wonder how your films seek to summon or imagine that absent, dispersed, silenced, or even exterminated collectivity?

Just as we affirm an aesthetics of trance, we also invoke a sublative logic that operates anonymously within poetic strategies and filmic practices. We consider that every traumatic process demands uprising, but every uprising is unviable without an unusual alliance – one that juxtaposes and binds, in the midst of the sordid, ablutions, oblations, and sublations. Every invocation and imagination require the activation of what we might call “ascensional burials” as means of suspension and transfiguration; we invoke subtractive ablations and atavistic superstitions as new audiovisual languages. We speak of liturgical sublations as ancestral affronts; infra-illustrated suggestions as pathways for enunciation; doxographic sarcophagi and reactors of epistemic fusion that bring provocation back into play.

Tierra en trance

Deleuze saw trance as a means of imagining the emergence of that missing people in “Third World” cinema, particularly in the work of Glauber Rocha. In shorts such as Tierra en trance, you signal a connection with that political cinematic archive. But your approach orients trance less toward direct conflict and more toward a sensory-cosmic poetics. How do you situate Deleuze’s thought in relation to our continent? How do you negotiate these references, manifestos, and geographies within your own practice?

It seems to us that in Deleuze’s case, the centre of confrontation remains the Enlightenment, and indeed we consider Enlightenment rationalism to be one of the most corrosive failed projects of dogmatic secularisation in history. Fortunately, the Enlightenment is retrogradable to the point where it becomes intermittent, fragmentary, discontinuous matter. It is upon this decomposing matter that trance operates, braiding together the fragmentary and the intermittent with the invariance and continuity of perpetual change, thus inciting a rhythmic potency that precipitates ritual, unusual alliances, and non-retrogradable connections. A stellar liturgy traced by the sonorous shadow of the image.

Your work is often perceived as a practice in which sound takes the place of the image, somewhat in the vein of filmmakers such as Duras, Farocki, Straub and Huillet… Yet, in your case, that operation seems situated, or “contaminated”,⁸ by the question of Latin America, for in granting autonomy to those missing voices there emerges an aesthetics of impurity⁹ that, in many ways, connects to the question of interculturalidad¹⁰ and multinaturalism.¹¹ What role does impurity play in your practice, and how do you understand that relationship between sound, image, and territory?

We understand the relationship between sound, image, and territory as a hierogamic praxis, a respiratory ellipse, somatic, an ellipsis suspended upon our communal insistence. We understand the relation through situational immersions in the politics of breathing, in rhythmic correlates, in atmospheric determinations. This is copal smoke, retention and condensation in the unbreathable atmosphere that our pulmonary breath confronts. Here, upon the wasteland of images, the people of our organs hurl themselves against all consciousness; the automated tribes within us assault every possible balance, embedding us in a destabilising arithmetic. The sonorous shadow of the image erupts upon the wasteland. Our internal hematic drum distributes circulatory pulses, ejecting the anima toward the rotating cluster of the sky. The body begins its imbalance, accumulates the arrhythmias of trance. Welcome to the most transparent region of the air.

Your work draws from diverse traditions and genealogies: militant, experimental, ethnographic, transnational. Do you see this convergence as producing an aesthetic akin to Oswald de Andrade’s anthropophagy¹² or Bolívar Echeverría’s codephagy,¹³ wherein subjugated groups appropriate and transform dominant cultural codes?

The genealogical crossings and the transversal character of the influences compel us to situate all audiovisual materials within a horizon of radical contingency, as a field of indiscernibility common to all the collective contents of the image. This leads us to posit an autophagic principle of relationality between absolutely contingent images and sounds, one that allows us to unleash a rhythmic seizure dependent, on the one hand, upon a radical non-commutativity in the order of a temporality fractured by iterative modules (nobody ever swim in the same river), and, on the other, upon a constant tension between the apparent impossibility of continuous stability and the (ir)reality of an expansive recursivity as the horizon of the insistent formal immobility of the collective contents of the image. This brings us to affirm a shamanic materialism as audiovisual praxis, through which we might intervene, induce, and bind trance as rhythmic-corporeal seizure upon the determinability of the filmic and audiovisual material according to an eidetic, archaic, ancestral, totemic, suggestive, mythical, and infrareal differentiality.

Although you do not define yourselves as a feminist collective, but rather as a poetic-political front that addresses interwoven structures of domination, the dismantling of male violence seems to be one of the central lines of your work. What place does this feminist dimension occupy both in your audiovisual practice and in your form of collective organization?

We can express it through a cumulative parable. Upon the suspended time of myth, we lie in seizures of agitation. Now, on the wasteland and from the anima, we glimpse the radiance of images: ancestral splendour shines, everyday life flashes. In the rural open field, the timeless past is contemporary with an inhibited present; together they nest a future manufactured by the great depopulator. Original accumulation. Here, the ancestral dismemberment of the goddess Coyolxauhqui is glimpsed by the mountains and cacti, the fruit ravines, and the valleys, oscillating witnesses of the lunar ascent. Here the interval is all that rises. 

Your films also circulate without credits, with a collective ethos, and are freely available online. This disarticulation of authorship and distribution seems at odds with the logics of the contemporary art market. How do you understand the relationship between anonymity, free access, and collective practice? And what role does this play in confronting established spectatorial habits of consumption?

We can express it through the following argument: the revolutionary dimension of anonymity stems from its savage affront to transcendence – that is, to the future as the eminent form of ordering, a future whose condition of existence implies an order of exclusive experience; we might call it a “continentally exclusive experience.” Now, the existence of the future is the correlate of certain empirical multiplicities, indicated and ordered by an essential form, let us say economic. However, the contingency of non-being nested in the core of all transcendence entails the proliferation of unrectifiable incoherences upon the ordered body of transcendence – and it is precisely the contingent that makes the emergence of unrectifiable incoherences possible. Therefore, the contingency nested in transcendence cancels the exceptionalism of the future.

That there is no longer a future implies that the entire order of transcendence loses the firm regulation of its nuances, foreshortenings, projections, apperceptions, anticipations, appearances, and essences. Thus, the dissolution of the ordered body of transcendence entails the trivialisation of the future – or the cancellation of its exceptionality. The dispersion of the effects enabled by the dissolution of the ordered body of transcendence operates a radical modification on the unbalanced field of consciousness, let us say “continental consciousness.” We may then conclude that the dissolution of the ordered body of transcendence is the annihilation of the future.

Finally, the residue of the annihilation of the future is the anima as a disordered field of consciousness, while the residue of the annihilation of the world is the wasteland [páramo] as a zone of radical indiscernibility. The annihilation of the future and of a world structured by transcendence implies that no real or eminent being is necessary for the residual being of consciousness. We thus understand that the residual being immanent to consciousness has the following concrete and inherent correlates: the anima and the wasteland. Therefore, the annihilation of the future and of the world ordered through continental transcendence implies a radical affirmation: nulla re indiget ad existendum, that is, the enunciative fibrillation of anonymity: nothing needs to exist.

Endnotes