Revelations by Sunlight: Translation, Monument and Metaphor in Colectivo los ingrávidos' The Sun Quartet
Art & Trash, episode 34
Plastic Masks: Possibly in Michigan as Urban Legend
Stephen Broomer, June 7, 2024
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 sound collage, 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.
In this video essay, Stephen Broomer discusses the metaphysical suggestions of Colectivo los ingrávidos' aesthetic approach to contemporary Mexico, an inferno of government abuse and multi-generational civilian terror.
The text of Revelations by Sunlight was first published in Cinema Scope Magazine in 2021.
SCRIPT:
The experimental filmmakers known as Colectivo los ingrávidos formed in Tehuacán, Mexico, in 2012. They adopted their name, which translates into English as ‘the weightless’, from the title of the first novel of Mexican author Valeria Luiselli, a novel that examines acts of translation that play out in three parallel lives against a backdrop of Spanish-language literary culture in North America. Inspired by Luiselli’s themes—of translation, displacement, and the imaginative reconstruction of identity—los ingrávidos posed a challenge to the repressive ideology evident in mainstream cinema. They have pursued the radical, alternative grammar of poetic filmmaking, contesting cultural officialdom, cherishing ecstatic communions with the natural world, and tethering aesthetic experience to social support and free will. Any description of the collective as a cohesive unit must also acknowledge the diversity of their processes, from diaristic visions of life in contemporary Mexico, to found footage and digital abstraction. The films and videos of los ingrávidos are signed in solidarity, under a collective banner, and yet express by this medley a restless collision of forms, fashioned together in love and outrage.
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 sound collage, 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.
All experience recedes. Memory fails. Some experiences recede faster than others. In interesting times of disposable souvenirs, fading elegies and dispersed attention, those in power can make uncomfortable truths—of complicity, incompetence and corruption—vanish under cover of night. Responsibility, blame, and with them, the possibility for reconciliation, collapse in an abyss of denial. A people’s history, dominated by events and dates—and the memorials that should follow them—is obscured by a mundane neoliberal opacity. The events that shape resistance—traumatic, brutal, transformative events—are erased by lies and inattention. Gone with them are the names of victims.
Against this tide, The Sun Quartet is a monument in light. It is, to invoke the name of its makers, a weightless monument, a transient but striking proof of pain and an inscription of national shame. The Sun Quartet reflects Jacques Derrida’s concept of hauntology, a temporal disjunction in which the ghosts of a civilization’s past ‘haunt’ its present. Derrida’s use of haunting as a metaphor is one of time out-of-joint, an enjoining of past and present in the ‘stone tapes’ of society. Derrida drew his theory from the atemporal ‘haunting’ of Europe by the spectre of Karl Marx, a potent critique in anticipation of political philosophers like Francis Fukuyama who had imagined a final triumph of capitalism in the global village of the 1990s. But Derrida’s phrase also finds ready parallels in Freud’s vengeful return of the repressed, Gilbert and Gubar’s mad women in the attic, Poe’s telltale heart, or the more general image of skeletons in a closet, provocative of scandals, conspiracies, hidden sins. Such ideas course through post-colonial experience, as presences that hang over paved paradises, too often in the absence of memorials.
Los ingrávidos turn to poetic realms, away from explication and didacticism, embracing instead visible phenomena and suggesting that invisible thread of experience that links the personal and the political. They recognize it in the penetrating gaze of the protestors, the marching throng of the crowd, the cloud cover of an overcast sky, the petals of sunflowers, the flesh of a watermelon, superimposed flames and cornstalks and skyscrapers, an uncomfortable reconciliation of past and present that interweaves agrarian and urban ideals. The collective recognizes the incapability of conventional ‘storytelling’ to account for so fragmented and mysterious a subject as the Ayotzinapa disappearances. The disappearances are a broken narrative that defies the conventional grammar of cinema and media, a testament to the paradoxical nature of truth; official versions are inevitable simplifications, in which ‘truth’ is an outcome of coerced testimonies, false witness, and a forsaking of responsibility by those in power. Los ingrávidos pursue a form that allows for the fabric of reality to become porous; that allows for poetic texts that speak truth to power and that allude to the spiritual core of resistance; and that allows for acts of witness that are truer to the ecstasies and sorrows of memory and perception. This poetic cinema is as concerned with values of light, composition and texture as it is with the rhetorical power of the chants, songs and call-and-response of protestors. Through this marriage of aesthetic improvisation and righteous testimony, The Sun Quartet gains its monumental character.
The first movement, Piedra de Sol, or Sunstone, shares its name with the Aztec artifact, a monolith believed to date to the 15th century that bears a circular carving crowded with glyphs and iconography. Both the relic and the film share their titles with Octavio Paz’s 1957 poem “Piedra de Sol,” a work defined in large part by its formal and thematic declarations of circularity, beginning and ending with this stanza:
a crystal willow, a poplar of water,
a tall fountain the wind arches over,
a tree deep-rooted yet dancing still,
a course of a river that turns, moves on,
doubles back, and comes full circle,
forever arriving:
The sunstone is at once an image of the endurance of an indigenous culture that predates the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors, and a symbol of the eternal circuit of experience, mirrored in the rotations of the earth, signalled in the stations of the cosmos. Like Paz, los ingrávidos build their film around images indicative of circulation, the ritualization of life that runs through nature, a birth-death cycle where dawn and sunset can become simultaneous. Piedra de Sol serves as a prelude, establishing motifs for the subsequent movements, and it begins in the wonder of superimposed images: a watermelon is sliced, flowers sway in the wind, and a cloudy evening sky breaks through the sunlit vista of a bountiful and mysterious landscape. Mountains and rivers are cast across tilled fields. Like the blade that penetrates the watermelon’s rind, the Mexican landscape is a testament to the competition of earthly things, a coexistence of wild growth and human engineering. The superimpositions are so dense as to confuse these images in an elemental spell, where water, sky, and earth are licked by flames. Protestors bear their slogans on shirts and placards, gathering in the shadow of a Mexican flag waved from the flagpole of a government building. A portal to an overgrown landscape is superimposed with skyscrapers at night and stalks of corn. Dense superimpositions offer a striking ontology, that such a wild overlapping of images is truer to perception than traditional composition. This confirms los ingrávidos’s belief that the grammar of media fails to meet the complexity of event. The images bleed over one another in flashes and dissolves, weathered by light leaks. The primacy of texture in Piedra de Sol—the bleeding of light, the granularity of the film stock, the wet flesh of the watermelon and the vivid tactility of other glimpsed phenomena—draws the work back from fury to a calm of direct, empirical recognition.
The images repeat, forming rounds and motifs, a sign that also echoes Paz, suggesting that the eternal circulation of life, of experience, of memory, forever arriving, is also an eternal circuit of grief. Los ingrávidos remind us of this explicitly, in the second film in the series, Río San Juan, when a protestor issues this haunting demand—“because they took them alive / we want them back alive.” Alive they were taken away. Alive we want them. Río San Juan takes its title from the investigative finding that the remains of some of the disappeared were dumped into the San Juan river in plastic bags. The image of a river—“forever arriving”—bears another potent metaphor for this part of the film. In Río San Juan, the crowd is now dominant, as kinetic cinematography mirrors the restless temper of the assembly, accounting the signs, faces and silhouettes of the protestors. On the soundtrack, the names of the disappeared are each called and the response comes en masse: “presente.” The roll-call of the classroom has become a structure for announcing the immensity of this loss, each name flowing into the next, presente, presente, presente, for the ambiguity of their fate, and the lack of accountability from the government, makes them forever present. The call-and-response turns to that haunting demand: “because they took them alive / we want them back alive.” As the protestors count to 43, the dense flow of images assume the metaphor of the river, a river of mourning and outraged faces, government buildings and a distant moon crossing the flesh of fruit and the needles of cacti.
On the soundtrack, the mother of a disappeared student articulates the deceptions of the government, the frustration of the protestors, and their hope that their loved ones are alive. The film bears a restless witness to her speech, such that even when the camera lingers on the faces of individuals, the density of its superimpositions overwhelms the image, often in light-licked frames, visible splices, dust and scratches indicative of the material base of the film. The material confrontation of Río San Juan becomes strongest in the final passage, as images struggle to register through a dense blue cast. Still, the protestors pierce the murky image. Even in this drowning gesture, the assembly is forever arriving.
The first two films in The Sun Quartet establish motifs and an aesthetic and metaphoric role for superimposition. But it is in the final two parts that the series becomes pronouncedly eulogistic, drawing heavily from poet David Huerta’s long poem “Ayotzinapa,” both on screen and on each film’s soundtrack. These films are longer and thus wear more plainly the hypnotic circulation of the superimpositions. The third film, Conflagracion, draws from imagery of flames, summoning a great fire that is at once the all-consuming blaze of a crumbling order and the inexhaustible fire of revolutionary renewal.
Conflagracion begins with a reading—on screen and on the soundtrack—of Huerta’s poem. A voice reads the poem in Chinese, captioned in English. When her voice stops, a collage of sounds from a protest enter. The veiled threats of government agents, courteous and composed, are announced over a loudspeaker with a mechanical grit that betrays their inhumanity. This is punctuated by the sound of bullets as the crowd’s chants become denser. Huerta’s poem offers that the dead are not departed, nor disappeared, but that their magic lingers in the dawn, in a spoon, in fields of corn; this sentiment, of the endurance of the soul, is illustrated, as fields of corn hold resilient against the conflagration of superimposed flames; so too does the night sky, rural landscapes, overgrown fields; so too do the neon signs, office towers and dense traffic of the city. When the flames subside, the protestors begin to sing Verdi’s “Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves,” an air of grief and endurance. O mia patria, si bella e perduta. Protestors and monuments mix in a haze of blue and light-struck frames; the yellow light leaks that have bled from the sides of the film achieve a resonance with the libretto. These images become “thoughts on golden wings.” As the crowd again counts to 43, through a veil of flames, the sound again collapses into a dense conflict of loudspeaker threats and bursts of gunfire.
David Huerta wrote “Ayotzinapa” on the Day of the Dead in 2014. The poem is a rallying cry that speaks to the trauma of disappearance. It was subsequently translated into and performed in twenty languages for the international journal Asymptote, the recordings of which provide the survey of translations that plays on the soundtrack of the final two movements of The Sun Quartet. Thus los ingrávidos have linked their series to an international movement of voices united in their demand for answers. In “Say Ayotzinapa,” an introduction to this translation project, Valeria Luiselli provided an introduction in which she writes of a universal responsibility “to not let Ayotzinapa fall back into the well of unfathomable, forgettable foreign words.”
The final movement, November 2, Far from Ayotzinapa, is named for the Day of the Dead. In shows of international support, the date was a global occasion for vigils to be held for the students, for instance, outside of the White House in Washington, D.C., far from Ayotzinapa. In their conclusion, Los ingrávidos take the horror of the Ayotzinapa disappearances further still, drawing from an archive of international translations of Huerta’s text in assembling a soundtrack that, like Huerta’s poem, is an offering of grief that sounds a universal resonance.
The rapturous superimpositions of Conflagracion metamorphose to a nirvana of everyday marvels, with fruit flesh, flower petals, and religious statuary passing in rapid dissolves over images suggestive of peaceful gatherings, away from the urgency of the protest. The poem is read in Japanese, Scots, French, Italian, Romanian, Portuguese, English, and its original Spanish. Each language brings an interpretation that spans clinical, passionate, furious. The incantatory power of Huerta’s poem is magnified by its repetition, by the coexistence of text on screen and on the soundtrack, but while The Sun Quartet resonates with Huerta’s imagery, it is not mere illustration. Los ingrávidos have assumed translation as an overarching theme. Despite the universal resonance of Huerta’s poem, the work is distinctively Latin American, distinctively Mexican, lodged firmly in the region of its making. The resultant work is thus, at its broadest, about corruption and hypocrisy, but it is also particular to this devastation, to the government in Mexico that bears particular sins, against those it has disappeared—far more than the 43 of Ayotzinapa—and against women and indigenous peoples and others for whom the military, the government’s war on drugs, and the opaque maze of bureaucracy pose a profound threat.
The perpetuation of Huerta’s text mirrors the perpetuation of motifs among the superimpositions; the superimpositions exemplify the paradox of density and transparency. In the aftermath of the conflagration, this final movement embraces the common wonders of perceptual experience, a vision of paradise. The funerary grief of the earlier movements have given way to nirvana. It is something of what Huerta might have suggested when he wrote of delivering “to our young dead / the bread of heaven,” a gift to the dead that ends in a silent gathering of what has been lost. As the readings enter a terminal phase—the final speaker is Huerta himself, returning the text to its original Spanish—the images become darker and denser, and the pulse of light between images more pronounced. Passages of colour photonegative—luminous impressions of flower petals against a deep, flat blue—give way to a final glimpse of the offering that began the series, a watermelon sliced in two on the grass, gradually surrounded by other fruits, struck intermittently by light leaks, to declare “the oblivion of the world.”
