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A Trance into Mexicanity: Interview with Annalisa D. Quagliata Blanco, director of ¡AOQUIC IEZ IN MEXICO! ¡YA MÉXICO NO EXISTIRÁ MÁS!

Ariadna Lucas Coronel

The body, like the territory, becomes a canvas on which history is printed. From the beginning, the title takes us to the starting point of the construction of the Mexican identity that Annalisa Quagliata confronts us with: Mexico will no longer exist; the non-existence in a sense of contrasts between our inheritance expressed in myths, deities and colonial violence and the needs for which we decided to uphold them.

Answering the question “How is it that we are?” is an inexhaustible task; thus, in ¡Aoquic iez in Mexico! ¡Ya México no existirá más! (2024), Annalisa chooses to incorporate the deities that sustain myths that many of us are unaware of. As part of her participation in the Mexican Feature Documentary category in the 22nd edition of the Morelia International Film Festival, we chatted with Annalisa about her artistic process.

FICM: What was your starting point in approaching Mexicanity from the point of view of an experimental documentary?

Annalisa Quagliata: My starting point was to return to the city where I grew up after several years and rediscovering it. To question the relationship we have with the memory of the territory, and to reflect a lot on all the forms of violence that are still in full force today. The Mexican nation-state is the great heir of all the colonial violence, so it made me reflect a lot about all the violence and our relationship with memory, which in some way has been disarticulated with that violence.

FICM: How do you explore and challenge the limits of documentary in this experimental work?

Annalisa Quagliata: It's a film that develops without a script, without any characters, and without a main character's journey we can follow. So maybe that in itself is already a challenge to other forms of filmmaking. The whole film is a challenge, I think. In any formal aspect of the film, in any aspect of how it was made. I made it at home, with friends, with a grant, and that's it. Let's go, let's do it all at home. It's a film made, in a way, as a family.

FICM: How do you decide which elements of the relationship we have with Mexicanity to represent in an experimental way?

Annalisa Quagliata: There is no decision. Perhaps there is a decision that detonated in an organic way. It is a work that is divided into five chapters and each chapter had its own development. It responds more to an exploration that began to happen. The first chapter has a narration of the Florentine Codex (Bernardino de Sahagún), and then an idea begins to develop around things that begin to unravel around something. The second chapter is triggered by a song at a rock concert and then as a whole idea of addressing the images that we incorporate into our skin. In short, each chapter is triggered by different interests and intuitions. And, well, one idea was also to make a journey where everything collides to generate a kaleidoscope.

FICM: It is a project, as you were saying, with a great individual workload, because you are in charge of everything, but you still have a team to back you up and help you. What was it like to work under this logic and how did you manage to achieve the diversity of photographic and video archives that can be seen in the documentary?

Annalisa Quagliata: I studied at an art school because I was very interested in experimental cinema, it's like my jam. In those film genres, it's very normal to work alone, to work at home with the tools you have, to manipulate manually, etcetera. So this is a work that derives from these practices. And that later extended to an exploration and a dialogue that I began to have with friends with whom I began to develop the film: Lizeth, Marcela Vázquez, Los Cogelones. This whole film, in a way, is like the residue of affective relationships that I had with them and that interacts artistically with all of them, with all those who are part of the project. In terms of creation, for me, it was quite natural, also quite heavy, because suddenly you start to carry a lot of work in all the different areas. A lot of the archive is digital or printed; a lot of magazines, a lot of books, a lot of internet research. What I could find, I snagged.

FICM: You said you've always been experimental because that's why you went to art school. So that's where the idea of intervening images comes from. How does the intervention of images contribute to the construction of the narrative?

Annalisa Quagliata: I feel that the whole journey is a way of kneading and dialoguing with the images. And one way of dialoguing with the images is to manipulate them, let's say that, in each manipulation or intervention of the images in each chapter, it has its own different logic. In the first chapter, this part where you see images of Tenochtitlán half torn by the wind had to do a lot with the content of what is unfolding in the narrative. There is another part where there is painted material, where there are petals and flowers, I was very interested in this idea of the potpourri, and the flower, and the song, and the party, and the colorful, the intervention with inks. There is an image of Coatlicue that is very watery, where you can hear the rain. Each intervention responds to the exploration of each fragment, I don't know, it is a way of making an image.

FICM: The cast, the women who are seen on screen in the documentary - there are at least two of them - did they have any input in the creative ideas? And how did you initially think about the construction of being a Mexican woman for the narrative?

Annalisa Quagliata: With Marcela Vázquez, who is really the one who embodies deities, so to speak, in a rather open exploration that we had, but who is the very embodiment of Tlazoltéotl at the end of the third chapter and in the color part as this figure that dances with the red light, etcetera. I did have a very extensive development back and forth with her for all the work we did. The dialogue I had with Lizeth as well, but I feel it was a very different dialogue, it was like an accompaniment. Because Marcela does dance and all the exploration we developed had to do with a bodily exploration. So the creative nature was very different.

FICM: And does it have to do with the construction of being a Mexican woman or simply of the deities?

Annalisa Quagliata: I didn't raise it the way you are raising it when we began to work, you know? Let's say that they were processes that went in very different ways. With Lizeth, for example, I began to attend López Austin's classes on Mesoamerican cosmovision as a listener. And Lizeth, who we see in chapter three, we see her in her mother's kitchen, we see her grandmother. And with her it is a dialogue around what we have been talking about violence and disarticulation. She no longer speaks Nahuatl, her grandmother did speak Nahuatl, in other words, all those processes that transcend a little bit to: What does it mean to be Mexican woman? But yes, obviously she also knew about all the dialogue she was having with Marcela around Tlazoltéotl, and the figures and the relationship we have with Nahua deities, which we tried to loosely combine in the film.