Have you seen?
Have you seen? is one of the three films made in 2017 by Colectivo Los Ingrávidos that speaks directly about gendered violence against women in Mexico: one from the perspective of the mothers (¿Has Visto?), the other of the daughters (Sangre Seca), and Coyolxauhqui from the disappeared victims. While Coyolxauhqui uses landscape and objects, the other two films use footage from protests in a public space. ¿Has Visto? shows the Mexican Mothers March that takes place annually on May 10th to protest against the disappearances of civilians, and Sangre Seca the protests from International Women’s Day on March 8th, 2017. All three are filmed with expired film stock, which produces the washed out colours in ¿Has Visto? and Coyolxauhqui and the characteristic pinkish tone of colour fading, combined with a degraded flaky surface of the 1959 Kodachrome used for Sangre Seca. Working with obsolete stock speaks directly to the scarcity of filmmaking in Mexico while it also reflects on the political Mexican landscape and the precariousness of the working class’s living conditions. The permanent sense of danger, risk and contradiction that emerge from the government’s neoliberal politics are conveyed in Los Ingrávidos’ medium and working processes.
Colectivo Los Ingrávidos is invested in using the capacity of the filmic medium to determine the experience of the image as an entity in itself, performed in the audience’s space. Flares, fade-outs at the beginning and the end of the reels, grain and other qualities become intrinsic parts and evidence of the film as object. The surface of the screen and the materiality of the medium are as important as the images and the sound. The apparatus becomes a central element that works in relation to the image instead of being a simple carrier of images. Los Ingrávidos are invested in making the viewer aware of the medium, proposing a radical empiricism in which perception and knowledge are not necessarily the same thing. Form is content and content is form. The films of this trilogy are more than a straight documentation of the protests or the space where the murders take place. The femicides are not a question of particular moments in time and space, what is at stake is the intervals between space and time, which connect all the actions as part of larger cultural formations.