Ancestralidad y Trance

Made Possible with the generous support from the Moser Family Foundation

Ancestralidad y trance is a constellation of films and texts mapped within the pictographic organization of the Aztec Sun stone. The sacrificial stone is carved with the Aztec solar calendar and connected with the monolith Coyolxauhqui (Moon) and the figure of Coatlicue (Earth). We are using these cyclical references to the Aztec calendar to link the violent relational trance of our present.

The project includes over 40 films by Colectivo los Ingrávidos, Stan Brakhage, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Teo Hernández, José Val del Omar, y Santiago Álvarez combined with spells, poems, calligrams, manifestos, and textual fragments written in Nahuatl, Spanish, English and Portuguese, by Nezahualcóyotl, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Maya Deren, the New American Cinema, Sky Hopinka, Dziga Vertov, Glauber Rocha, and Jean Rouch. These are films and texts that understand filmmaking as a form of ritual that opens spaces of acute awareness and deep listening. Like in a ritual, the viewing process and the reading carved in the sun stone generate different levels of accessibility and participation. The shamanic cinema of Ingrávidos allows us to slowly penetrate the past, connecting ancestral omens with the material and metaphysical qualities of our present.

Ancestralidad y trance proposes a spatiotemporal trance where myth, violence, ancestry, precariousness and extinction, generate multiple speculative and multinaturalist cinematic perspectives. By grounding the viewing process in a material ritualistic object, we acknowledge the embodiment of mediated online viewing as a form of political agitation, a trance that the camera awakens, and expands. 

Colectivo los Ingrávidos 
Almudena Escobar López

Colectivo Los Ingrávidos

Colectivo Los Ingrávidos was founded in 2012 to dismantle 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, 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. Their work has played at various film festivals including International Film Festival Rotterdam, RIDM Montreal International Documentary Festival, Images Festival; Punto de Vista, The Florida Experimental Film/Video Festival, CROSSROADS, BFI London Film Festival, Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival, Media City Film Festival, Experimental film festival Process, Ambulante Cine Documental, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Ann Arbor Film Festival, and Festival Internacional de Cine FILMADRID. Their work was a part of the 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. They were awarded jury prizes at Media City Film Festival, the Youth Award at Punto de Vista, 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). They will be showcasing work at the upcoming New York Film Festival, 2021.

Almudena Escobar López

Almudena Escobar López is an independent curator, archivist, and researcher from Galicia, Spain.She has organized screenings and exhibitions internationally at galleries, cinemas, and festivals, including Film Society Lincoln Center, Cinemateca de Bogotá, Cineteca Nacional de México, Anthology Film Archives, Union Docs, and the Alternative Film-Video Festival in Serbia. She is the Assistant Curator of Media Arts at the Memorial Art Gallery (MAG) in Rochester, NY where she also serves on the Board of Trustees of the Visual Studies Workshop. Some recent exhibitions and programs include the 2020 edition of Art of the Real at the Film Society Lincoln Center, Ja’Tovia Gary: Giverny I (NÉGRESSE IMPÉRIALE) (MAG), and the Winter/Spring Flaherty NYC series “Common Visions.”In addition, she has contributed criticism to MoMa Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Vdrome, Vertical Features, MUBI Notebook, Afterimage, and Film Quarterly, among other publications and catalogues. Since 2017 she serves on the Board of Trustees of the Visual Studies Workshop, and the Advisory Board of Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center in Buffalo, NY; and more recently has joined the International Fund Development Team of Media City Film Festival. Escobar served as a Film/Video panelist for the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts in 2021.