Shamanic Materialism and the Aesthetics of Trance: The Political Film-Making of Colectivo Los Ingrávidos

Join us for a screening of two films from Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, followed by a discussion of their manifesto ‘thesis on the audiovisual’.

FRIDAY 11 April 5:30-6:30pm at the Interactive Cinema Space – Arts West, University of Melbourne (building 148a, level 3, room353)

contact: sean.mcmorrow@unimelb.edu.au

Colectivo Los Ingrávidos (Tehuacán, Mexico) is a group of indigenous filmmakers and artists that was created in 2012 during major protests against the Mexican government, originally creating videos on an anonymous Youtube account. Since then, they have been incredibly prolific, producing hundreds of short experimental films, videos and expanded cinema works. As they write themselves, their work arises from the need "to dismantle the audiovisual grammar that the aesthetic-television-cinematic corporatism has used and uses to effectively guarantee the diffusion of an audiovisual ideology by means of which a continuous social and perceptive control is maintained over the majority of the population". To this end, the Colectivo deploy the twin conceptual strategies of what they call "Shamanic Materialism" and "Aesthetics of Trance" to create radical, beautiful, often disorienting and destabilizing works, that challenge dominant ways of seeing.

Discussants:
Charlie Hewison holds a PhD in film studies and is an associate researcher of the CERILAC laboratory at Université Paris Cité. His research focuses on (neo-)materialist and ecocritical approaches to cinema, particularly in contemporary experimental practices. He recently co-edited the books Écocritiques. Cinéma, audiovisuel, arts (Hermann, 2023) and Cinématérialismes. Nouvelles approches matérialistes de l'audiovisuel (Mimésis, 2024). A co-founding member of the GERMAINE research group, he is also a film programmer and artistic director of the Festival des Cinémas différents et expérimentaux de Paris, and member of the Light Cone association selection committee.

Cristóbal Escobar is a Lecturer in Screen Studies at the University of Melbourne and a Film Programmer for the Santiago International Documentary Film Festival (FIDOCS). He is the author of The Intensive-Image in Deleuze’s Film-Philosophy (Edinburgh University Press, 2023), editor of Cine Cartográfico (La Fuga Ediciones, 2017), and co-editor, with Barbara Creed, of two volumes on Film and the Nonhuman (Senses of Cinema, 2024; University of Exeter Press, forthcoming). His current work focuses on the concept of mestizaje in contemporary Latin American cinema – a category that unfolds from antagonistic worlds and and which refuses to comply with prevailing modes of representation to work instead towards the construction of a new visibility.

Sean McMorrow teaches in the department of Media & Communications, University of Melbourne. He is editor of Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy, and author of The Power to Assume Form: Cornelius Castoriadis and Regimes of Historicity (Lexington Books, 2023) and co-edited volume Marcel Gauchet and the Crisis of Democratic Politics (Routledge, 2022).