Colectivo Los Ingrávidos: Anticolonial Experiments in Material Mysticism | Mousse

In this text for the Winter 2026 issue of Mousse, I engage with the prolific works and philosophical writings of the Mexico-based group of largely anonymous filmmakers, Colectivo Los Ingrávidos. Considering their provocative theorization of “shamanic materialism,” the text interrogates the group’s unique anti-colonial interventions within the documentary genre and the politics of the moving image, considering the ways their multiple bodies of work merge the visual grammars of militant Third Cinema and avant-garde traditions with the cinematized rhythms of indigenous metaphysical schemas, symbolic orders, and narrative structures. Formed in response to the domination and manipulation of audiovisual regimes by the Mexican state and its corporate allies—especially in light of recent mass uprisings tied to the ongoing drug war—the text considers the political stakes of the groups’ retooling of the filmic apparatus as a means of inducing “agitational trances” in viewers.

Image: Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, The Sun Quartet (still), 2017. Courtesy of the artists.