Colectivo Los Ingrávidos

5 May 2025, 19.00 SPCE

Duration: 60 min

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.“

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.

Recent retrospective includes, focus and monograph at VIENNALE International Film Festival Vienna, IFFR International Film Festival Rotterdam (Focus: Colectivo Los Ingrávidos), ICA International Contemporary Arts (Retrospective of Colectivo Los Ingrávidos), TIFF – Toronto International Film Festival, Harvard Film Archive, The Brakhage Center of the University of Colorado Boulder. A solo exhibition of the collective work at MoMA as a part of Modern Mondaysseries; Tate-Modern Film Series, London; Block Museum – Northwestern University, Chicago, Conversation at the Edge – Gene Siskel Film Forum en la School of the Art Institute of Chicago; MoMI – Museum of the Moving Image, New York; The Flaherty Film Seminar, New York; Whitney Bienal 2019, Whitney Museum of American Art; BIM – Bienal de la Imagen Movimiento de Buenos Aires, Seoul Media City Biennale 2025, فـــن ســـینما ڤابـــس Gabès Cinema Fen in Tunisia.

In 2025, we published the book Colectivo Los Ingrávidos: An Anthology [2012-2024]. Edited by Steven Cairns (Institute of Contemporary Art London), Guilherme Blanc (Batalha Centro de Cinema) and Almudena Escobar López (Toronto Metropolitan University).