ANNALISA D. QUAGLIATA
PROGRAMME
Filmoteca de Galicia | Tuesday June 4th | 8:00 pm | Free entry to all venues until full capacity. It will not be possible to enter the venues after the screening has started.
¡AOQUIC IEZ IN MEXICO! (MEXICO WILL NO LONGER EXIST!)
Annalisa Quagliata | 2024 | México | 16 mm to HD | 87 min
A frenetic view runs over a convulsed Mexico City, a colossal metropolis sustained by the myth of multiracialness and other colonial forms of violence. Past and present weave a flurry of images; fragmented memories of this land. Ancient deities are incarnated, while dreams overlap among intimacy, complicity and the tumult. This is an erratic film that invites us to reimagine the complex relationship we have with “Mexicanness.” (Annalisa Quagliata)
ANNALISA D. QUAGLIATA
MEXICO WILL NO LONGER EXIST!
There are films that seem to exude heat; that breathe and perspire; that are like wild, unpredictable beings; that feel like entering an atmosphere full of vapours and odours that seep into everything. Mexico will no longer exist! is precisely that, and it is quite paradoxical that a film with such a title makes the pulse of the city of the same name exist so palpably within a cinema hall: we are talking about Mexico City, ancient Tenochtitlan, expanded and built upon a lake after the conquest. Annalisa D. Quagliata has created a portrait of the city in which she lives with a life of its own, in which past and present, myth and reality, purity and multiraciality, rage and sensuality all merge.
Annalisa D. Quagliata is one of the driving forces behind the effervescent contemporary underground film scene in Mexico City, not only via creation, but also via cultural activism and by exhibiting in her space La Cueva, and also as a member of the Experimental Cinema Laboratory, a vital site for analogue cinema in Mexico. As a filmmaker, her work over the years has covered both the recent history of Mexico and the ancestral roots of its culture from a feminist and anti-colonial perspective. The heavily political nature of her work is intertwined with powerful work with the materiality of cinema, which is fundamental in her feature film Aoquic iez in Mexico! (Mexico will no longer exist!).
Aoquic iez in Mexico! is a film divided into several chapters that draw connections and associations between ancestral culture and contemporary Mexico City. Quagliata creates an aesthetic universe for each of these chapters: whether this is by using frame-by-frame filming, frenetic dancing with the camera in stuttering sensory shots, using overlays and vibrant colours, or else via moments of restful, careful observation, or mises-en-scène that draw on indigenous myths and images. In her synopsis, Quagliata highlights the complex relationship with the “Mexicanness” of which the film speaks, and which is undoubtedly one of its main threads. That Mexicanness can range from recovering pre-Hispanic symbols and gods, to integration into the cultural tropes of today’s Mexico, the result of colonialism and racial blending, and where everything has its place, from the lottery to quinceañera birthday parties and the melodies by Los Ángeles Azules. Everything merges and blurs together in a way that is as chaotic and as exciting as the way the city itself works, tracing out a multitude of associations and staggering analogies. This happens, for example, when she brings together the iconography of the city’s underground train stations with the Mexican symbols from which they originate, to then end up observing the young people who tattoo those same symbols and gods, claiming their space and their identity outside of the institutional, regulated space of the Archaeological Museum. The punk aesthetics of Los Cogelones in a pogo dance, experimental Mexican rock, acts as a crucible for this never-ending redress. The unrushed ritual of making tamales leads to another raw, sensual and sexual ritual (in the magical mises-en-scène of nudity, food and piñata by Marcela Vásquez, a recurring motif throughout the film). We see the parades with fanciful traditional costumes (halfway between indigenous and colonial) packed into the concrete streets of the metropolis, and the tortilla factory that grinds the corn, a pre-Hispanic emblem, in a relentless machine. It is more than just a tale, which cannot be explained in words, and which Quagliata has been able to conjure up using cinema, its forms and its powers, translating that complexity into images, montage cuts and a rich collage of sound. Aoquic iez in Mexico! gets us to understand all of this with one’s body, and that is perhaps the most important thing a film can do.
Elena Duque