Chiles en Nogada

In 2009 Billy Roisz and her friends and fellow musicians Angelica Castello, Burkhard Stangl and Dieter Kovacic took a trip to Mexico. After starting in Mexico City, they traveled through Michoacán to the peninsula of Yucatán. And the film Chiles en Nogada, about the journey, was created as a result.

"Chiles en nogada" is a traditional Mexican dish. Its colors are those of the country’s flag, and of its history: red, white and green, and vice versa. The opposite, the Other, and its reflection is the film’s essence and what sets it apart.

On the basis of the music, which prepares us for what’s to come, entry into the visual dimension commences when lines turn into spaces and colors become entire worlds. The initial chaos is also the journey’s beginning. As they turn red and then pink, the images are seared into the spectator’s retina: Mexico, D.F., the capital and one of the world’s largest metropolises. These images and visual experiences, most of them fleeting impressions without a story to tell, represent every journey’s framework. The story is revealed through recognition and comprehension. The traveler can contextualize only what is already familiar, what he or she recognizes. The rest is gathering. Billy Roisz collects and comprehends — she comprehends the Other according to her own artistic system. Visually and acoustically, she composes a new and unique approach to what is strange to her. This composition liberates diversity. The individual is released from the necessity of making connections without becoming lost in the magnitude of the story. The still images are what give moment to reflection so that it can again turn to the continuum of time and history through movement.
They leave the urban Moloch, and the sky hangs low over the mountains. Freedom is a promise that is not possible without a decision. Antonin Artaud and a number of others have searched Mexico for hallucinogenic substances that could help them find images for their visions. Billy Roisz clarifies the image and, easily and taking pleasure in the making of a decision, passes from the third dimension to the fourth. She provides the trip and the journey with a foundation. Simple as that. The lines and auditory waves, the drawings and associative moments are what admit the Other through transparency in Chiles en Nogada. Transcendence. Subjective perception. A single law. Freedom.
(Maike Mia Höhne / Translation: Seteve Wilder)


Travel memories are subjective, often romantic, and incomplete. Focusing solely on atmosphere, the travel diary Chiles en Nogada presents itself in abstract flickers. Every once in a while there is a flash of a concrete and almost cliché image of a classic tourist destination … The hypnotic static images domineer the screen with the filigree, sawing noise landscapes by Angélica Castelló, dieb13 and Burkhard Stangl. Once upon a time in Mexico.
(Diagonale 2011)