Notes on 3 Recent Films by Colectivos Los Ingrávidos (Patreon)

I discovered the work of the Mexican filmmaking group Los Ingrávidos last year while previewing films for the Crossroads festival. I discovered their highly impressive Sun Quartet, a suite of films that were not like anything I'd seen in a very long time. Highly political yet fiercely dedicated to a highly unique, challenging aesthetic, the work of Los Ingrávidos combined documentary footage of protests, diary material, traditional Catholic imagery, and a dense visual and sonic layering that placed the viewer in a state of confusion and sensory overload. The works were like a Latin American response to the prim and proper nature of so much European modernism, while also giving a nod to Theodor Adorno's ideas about the negative dialectic. These were films of beautiful refusal.

In the year and a half since, Los Ingrávidos has been showing all over the world, and most recently secured a spot in the 2019 Whitney Biennial. They are amazingly productive. My Vimeo feed seems to feature new work by the group on a weekly basis. I have not been able to keep up, but I wanted to check in with Los Ingrávidos and see what they were up to.

Postal

Of the three films I watched, Postal is the most successful. It is just over four minutes, and engages the viewer in a game of hide and seek with its layered images. Their appearance onscreen is a kind of combat against the dark, represented by vertical and horizontal raster bands moving against each other, so the image kind of weaves in and out of existence. Meanwhile, the image itself is shifting. The artists have organized a series of video collages of paintings, religious icons, and Russian advertising placards, overlaid in both mixed, local colors and, at times, saturated single hues. The overall effect is a combination of Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol, but processed through a video function machine that is designed to conceal as much as it reveals.

Redadas

Working along similar lines to Postal but in a different direction, Redadas exhibits the influence of Jasper Johns, but it doesn't do very much with that influence beyond merely exhibiting it. The six-minute video is essentially a motion drawing of intricate horizontal and vertical thatching, with portions of the image sometimes forming an implication of deep space in the form of a structure or a staircase. In this respect, there is also a bit of M.C. Escher at play here. Working atop the linear information, we have thick globules of digital color that expand over the lines, giving a slight impression of Johns' famous encaustic painting method. So Redadas is largely a study of line versus texture. At a certain point, a map of the central United States appears, furthering the Johns connection. However, for unknown reasons, Los Ingrávidos use a portion of Steve Reich's Different Trains as the soundtrack to the piece. There is no concrete connection to the image track, and Reich's composition is so iconic that it mostly obliterates Ingrávidos' efforts.

Inherent Drone

Seemingly the most recent of the pieces, and definitely the weakest, Inherent Drone continues the automatic digital drawing method, combining the least disciplined elements of Postal and Redadas. A chaotic overlay of maps, graphs, and charts, none of which are visible and so only signify their own techno-authority, are bombarded with random LeRoy Neiman splotches of color, some of which occasionally take the form of bomb blasts. On the soundtrack, we hear a man reading some form of English lesson that sounds like a nightmarish blend of Bruce Nauman and the CIA. "We destroy matter to create matter. We create matter to destroy matter. We destroy the universe to create the universe," etc. Again, the provenance of this audio recording is a mystery, and most significantly, the video creates no context for understanding it. So Inherent Drone, seemingly an attempt at political art, is really just an agglomeration of sinister things. It tells us less than nothing.

This films can all be viewed at Colectivo Los Ingrávidos' Vimeo page.