Screening Colectivo Los Ingrávidos - The Sun Quartet
The “Sun Quartet” is a solar composition in four movements, a political composition in four natural elements, an audiovisual composition in four physical transformations: a sunstone on which youth blossoms in protest, a river flooding the streets, the burning plain rising up in the city. And finally, the outcry of the people that shook Mexico after the night of September 26, 2014. The disappearance of 43 students from Ayotzinapa tore a hole in the political body of Mexico.
“The Sun Quartet addresses the climate of corruption and violence that characterizes today’s Mexican leadership and militarism. In its four parts, the series illustrates the collective’s poetic working methods, which combine elements such as improvisational music, superimposed film sequences, poetic texts both read aloud and projected onto the screen, as well as documentation of protests. These elements coalesce into an alternative narrative to the official claims to truth regarding traumas as recent as the disappearance of 43 students from the rural teacher-training college of Ayotzinapa in 2014 in Iguala, Mexico, and as far back as the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre, a defining event in contemporary Mexican revolutionary consciousness. The Sun Quartet also evokes resonances of older, unspeakable traumas that lie even further back—ruptures that reach deep into Mexico’s past, its genocides and massacres, the atrocities committed in its name, its significance as a stage for colonial ambitions. The Sun Quartet combines phenomenological fascination with the terrifying climate of contemporary Mexican governance and the historical foundations of this terror.”
Colectivo Los Ingrávidos (Tehuacán) is a Mexican film collective founded in 2012 to deconstruct commercial and corporate audiovisual grammar and the ideology embedded within it. The collective draws inspiration from the historical avant-garde and their commitment to using both form and content to challenge alienating realities. Their methods combine digital and analog media, interventions in
archival materials, mythology, agitprop, social protests, and documentary poetry. Their radical experiments with documentary and cinematic means generate images—both visual and acoustic—that in themselves represent political possibilities.
Recent retrospectives, thematic series, and monographs include: the VIENNALE – Vienna International Film Festival, the IFFR – International Film Festival Rotterdam (Focus: Colectivo Los Ingrávidos), the ICA – International Contemporary Arts (Retrospective of Colectivo Los Ingrávidos), the TIFF – Toronto International Film Festival, the Harvard Film Archive, and the Brakhage Center at the University of Colorado Boulder. A solo exhibition of the collective’s work at MoMA as part of the “Modern Mondays” series; Tate Modern Film Series, London; Block Museum – Northwestern University, Chicago; “Conversation at the Edge” – Gene Siskel Film Forum at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; MoMI – Museum of the Moving Image, New York; The Flaherty Film Seminar, New York; the 2019 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art; BIM – Bienal de la Imagen Movimiento de Buenos Aires; the 2025 Seoul Media City Biennale; and 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).