Shot with nonprofessional actors on location in his childhood hometown of Ajusco, Mexico, Abraham Cruzvillegas’s abstract film portrait intertwines static footage of the area’s volcanic landscape with unscripted moments of intimacy and encounter. The artist uses the predictable, mechanistic structure of early pornographic movies to build a nonlinear story of fragments that collapse past and present as well as the neighborhood’s history and its improvised reality. Throughout his artistic practice, Cruzvillegas investigates what he calls autoconstrucción (self-construction)—a process through which he gives new life to found materials while working in urban or rural environments around the world. 2009, video, 62 minutes.
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