Altépetl

Altépetl, Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, 35mm & digital, 2013

Thesis 72: Shamanic Materialism links ancestrality, extinction and trance as speculative and multinaturalist perspectives of the dialectical hyperimage of movement.

Thesis 73: Incompatible, paradoxical and irreconcilable perspectives constitute the relational correlate of the dialectical hyperimage of movement.

Thesis 74: What exists in multinature involves a turbulent mythical flow that continues to pulse and to extinguish; it is the powerful volcanic life of beings and things, a life that, through the cinematic and audiovisual process, expresses them not as differently perceived self-identical entities but as immediately relational multiplicities.

Thesis 75: The radical nature of the contingency asserted by materialism implies recovering the idea that destruction and annihilation can exist without any counterpart, without any compensation; it is about recognizing that there are absolute losses that will never be recovered, events without any consequences, civilizations and entire peoples annihilated and lost in the nothingness of History without leaving any trace, like those great rivers that disappear in the sands of a planetary desert. The idea that in the world there are a number of things, objects, subjects, events, flows, lives and events that will be absolutely annihilated and not recovered, the reality of that idea, we say, manifests the abrasiveness of the vast machinery of annihilation that inhabits the desert of the real.

Thesis 76: The perspectivism, the conversion and the mythical connection of the dialectical hyperimage open an eventual field in History.

Thesis 77: Shamanic materialism as a cinematic and audiovisual process leads to and entails a political film-trance of agitation in which the agitation would no longer emanate from a coming to awareness or call for mass mobilization, but would consist of placing contingencies and circumstances in a trance, including, in the first place, Reason itself, relating violence and contingencies to each other, so that through trance, violence, myth, ancestry, precariousness and extinction a new cosmological and cosmopolitical perception of the Missing People is formed.

Thesis on the Audiovisual, Colectivo Los Ingrávidos

* Altépetl, a term derived from in atl, in tepetl (“the water, the mountain”) denoting the provincial unit, or regional state, of pre-Hispanic Nahua society. By definition, each altepetl had a ruler, land base, marketplace, and temple dedicated to a patron deity. The altepetl was subdivided into smaller districts (groups of four, six, and eight were common) known as Calpulli or Tlaxilacalli, which enjoyed political representation and gave tribute services by means of a rotational system. After the Spanish invasion, institutions such as the encomienda and parish were based directly on the altepetl, known later as a pueblo, which generally continued to be governed by Indigenous elites.