March 8th, 2024 – 6 pm

La Ranura en el Tiempo (Anáhuac contra los Robots)

Anáhuac against robots.

An invisible war takes place; it is a confrontation of a magical order. It is the signs and their repetition that produce time and its symptoms.
Other maps are needed in order to account for the dislocation.
quantum event maps
interior travel maps
sonic maps
common memory maps
milpa maps
maps of connections

Anáhuac contra los robots.

Una guerra invisible tiene lugar, es una confrontación de orden mágico. Son los signos y su repetición los que producen el tiempo y sus síntomas.
Se necesitan otros mapas que den cuenta de la dislocación.
mapas de eventos cuánticos
mapas de viajes interiores
mapas sónicos
mapas de memoria común
mapas milpa
mapas de conexiones

One of the most prominent and singular figures in contemporary experimental cinema, Mexican filmmaker Bruno Varela began his career in 1992 in Oaxaca as part of the Indigenous community video project Ojo de Agua Comunicación and, later, in Chiapas, Yucatán and Bolivia training Indigenous video communicators. Defined by the filmmaker as a “retro-garde,” Varela’s film praxis combines formal procedures from experimental film, such as the dialogic re-use of archival images-sounds, with autochthonous cultural elements. “Adjacent” visualities and epistemologies emerge against the backdrop of the Mexican historico-political context.

La Ranura en el Tiempo (Anáhuac contra los Robots) [The Slot in Time (Anáhuac Against Robots), 2024], finalised during Varela’s residency at Hangar from November to December 2023, in the frame of the Programme Amérika: Cinematographic Gestures to Re-enchant the World, gives continuity to the filmmaker’s procedures and methodologies. The piece, which forms a film diptych and an “expanded cinema assemblage” with La Máquina de Futuro (The Machine of the Future, 2024), takes as its point of departure La France contre les robots (France against Robots), a philosophical reflection on the “civilisation of the machines” and a critique of industrial technology and machinism written by Georges Bernanos in 1944 during his Brazilian exile and published three years later. Bernanos’ text was transposed to cinema by Jean-Marie Straub in 2020 in his last film, the two versions of which also compose a diptych. Varela places these references on an intertextual fabric, including phytograms collectively produced during the filmmaker’s workshop at Hangar in November 2023 with endemic plants —and thus also knitting together natural elements of two different “contact zones”— to rethink the relation between material infrastructures, cosmologies and ritualities. Assumed as “speculative technology,” cinema is used as a technological instrument to suppress the separation between the material and the ritual spheres, the second becoming the film’s structuring system. La Ranura en el Tiempo operates widely on a contiguity principle, adopting discontinuous connections in conjunction with multiplication as its constitutive logic.

The shooting of the dance performance of Rosario Ordoñez Fuentes in the ancient Zapotec city of Dainzú in the State of Oaxaca works on the contiguity principle. Varela’s camera becomes a prosthetic extension of the filmmaker’s reactions to the dancer’s improvised actions. If the relationship between observer and observed is conceived in terms of continuity and reciprocity instead of separation and rupture, the film enacts, in parallel, a ritualisation of the cinematic representation questioning the mind-body and human-machine dualisms, and opening passageways between the domain of the visible and that of the invisible. Moreover, these performative, formal and material procedures and methodologies, combined during the editing process with superposition, vertical and horizontal editing forms and polyphonic visual and sound elements, induce divergent perceptive and cognitive modes. These procedures and methodologies affirm cinema’s performativity: images-actions affect the world, eventually producing modalities of resistance.

In La Ranura en el Tiempo, it is “Anáhuac,” a Meso-American category for “universe” or “world” in Nahuatl, instead of “France” in Bernanos’ reflection, that opposes the “robots.” That is, not the Lumières, which contributed to paving the way to modernity —and paradoxically to modern (and contemporary) colonialism and its machines of genocide and epistemicide— but a Meso-American category. In such a way, La Ranura en el Tiempo not only radically criticises scientifico-philosophical and technological constructions through an embodied perspective but also adopts an inter-epistemological system —the cinematic apparatus, even if diverted from its dominant uses and profaned through semi-artisanal materialist modes of production, including archival re-use and shooting with expired film, is itself a technology of modernity— formalised through a correlative inter-visual aesthetics. A critique of modernisation projects, such as that of the post-revolutionary Mexican Nation-State, the construction of which is traversed by a tension between modernism and primitivism and the systematic oppression of Indigenous peoples and cultures, underpins this gesture.

La Ranura en el Tiempo operates on contiguity at multiple levels. The “tortilla,” a central element of the Meso-American diet, the survival of which could epitomise resistance against colonialism, as well as a transversal content-form in Varela’s work, acquires a cosmological and sacred dimension beyond its materiality —or, more accurately, affirming the contiguity between the material and the ritual spheres. If the formal procedures of La Ranura en el Tiempo underline the analogies between the “tortilla”’s circular geometry and that of the astra, the mechanical rotations of the Verástegui “tortilladora” (“tortilla” machine) in La Máquina de Futuro —a piece that, in the words of Varela, “folds in two” with the first film— evoke a cyclical conception of time. These two aspects, along with the film’s experimental procedures and its double performative dimension, could link —while expanding, if not shifting, the signifiers— the original etymological meaning of the term “Revolution” (to impart a rotational movement to an object or the revolving motion of the celestial bodies; in short, circular geometrical movements or astronomical rotations) to its modern meaning: political transformations that affect human life in all its dimensions. In such a way, the dynamic “ranura” of La Ranura en el Tiempo outlines a formal-visual revolution and contours an opening, a slot, that entropically fractures dominant temporal conceptions and patterns structuring economic, social, cognitive and representational models, a politico-epistemological act.

Text by Raquel Schefer