EARTH – PROGRAM BY COLECTIVO LOS INGRÁVIDOS (FILMFEST DRESDEN – INTERNATIONAL SHORT FILM FESTIVAL)

EARTH – PROGRAM BY COLECTIVO LOS INGRÁVIDOS (FILMFEST DRESDEN – INTERNATIONAL SHORT FILM FESTIVAL)

By Colectivo los Ingrávidos

Is it possible, perhaps, that we arrived too late for the ancestors? Is it acceptable to neutralize and erase centuries of colonial violence through the continuation of a movement of planetary annihilation? Against the apparent global triumph of artifice we assert a frontier-zone audiovisual meditation: It is not too late for being-earth.

And yet the Earth is undecidable, numinous, undying; a great resistance effort is required to decide anything about the Earth as everything that is decidable runs the risk of an ominous, sinister, baleful outcome. Everything that is decidable ventures into the general collapse and breakdown of its own premises, threatening to drag with it all civilization and peoples according to fateful demands like those mobilized by the imperative: Land, Blood, and Capital! For it is on the land that aberrant political morphologies, intolerable prison landscapes, corrosive gentrifications, annihilating logics of extraction and destructive civilizing violence have been decided.

Our audiovisual meditation thus begins with bearing witness to an immeasurable relationship between the Earth and everything that is decided on it, but also to the strength of a decision, as well as the different perspectives and strategies to underpin it. Our audiovisual journey leads us from a gestural ideal materialized in the temporal layers of bronze, an ideal incommensurable with the fragility and inconsistency of human bodies abstracted from history in the piece Vigeland/Riefensthal. It continues with The Violence of Civilization Without Secrets, in which an extremely coercive scientific, cultural, archival and museum bureaucracy, from whose arrogant and apparently progressive ideal we extract a problematic and incommensurable relationship with the indigenous sovereignty that vindicates the being-earth of the Ancestor, whose people provide the dignity of the burial and the final repatriation of the ancient to the Earth. 

We also share the elemental and atmospheric perspectivism of open sky / opens sea / open ground in whose perceptive generosity there lies another form of connection with the undying. Meanwhile, with Cerro Saturno we transition from the numinous, demarcated by the absence of the human, towards the persistence of marks, traces, signs of artifice that struggle to divide the Earth to make transitable, communicable, and ultimately habitable. And the habitable is never exempt from outcomes such as the infamous political and historical outcomes that brought about the prison landscapes, systems of natural reserves and indigenous reserves within a country that underpinned the history of its excesses with the arrogance of an ominous manifest destiny. This is why we admire the poetry and relevance of Sunflower Siege Engine, which shares with us one of the moments of resistance, belligerence, and indigenous sovereignty seen during the occupation of Alcatraz in 1969. Finally, the telluric and aerial character of Tierra en Trance brings us the palpitation, pulse and rhythm that accompanies the being-earth of the living world, in whose eccentricity all decision collapses under the primordial and percussive rhythm of an audiovisual trance.

Program: Earth
Duration: 80 minutes
Filmfest Dresden – International Short Film Festival 

Vigeland / Riefenstahl, Sara Eliassen, 2018-2020, Norway

 

The Violence of a Civilization Without Secrets, New Red Order, 2017, United States

 

open sky / open sea / open ground, Libertad Gills, Martin Baus, 2021, Ecuador

 

Cerro Saturno, MIguel Hilari, 2022, Bolivia

 

Sunflower Siege Engine, Sky Hopinka, 2022, United States

 

Tierra en Trance, Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, 2022, Mexico