Tania Ximena’s (Mexico b. 1985) La marcha del liquen (The Stride of Lichen, 2024) is a 29-minute experimental short that quietly unsettles our assumptions about distance, time, and environmental crisis. Shot in Yokot’an and Spanish, with Spanish and English subtitles, the film draws a striking connection between two seemingly unrelated landscapes: Antarctica’s ice-covered expanses and the mangrove-laced shores of Tabasco, Mexico. Her film is a study in contrasts: melting glaciers and tropical floods, proximity and distance. Yet beneath these differences is a shared vulnerability—a reminder that no place, no matter how remote, is untouched by the global climate crisis. Through slow, contemplative imagery and immersive soundscapes, Ximena invites us to witness ecological collapse as a shared vulnerability.
Ximena is no stranger to landscapes on the edges. Known for her feature debut Pobo ‘Tzu (White Night, 2021), she brings a keen eye for environmental precarity, honed through extensive field research and, most recently, her participation in the Colombian Antarctic Expedition. La marcha del liquen continues her exploration of fragile ecologies with a subtle yet insistent power, offering a meditation on endurance in the face of catastrophe.
The film begins in Antarctica. Glacial snow, compacted over years, merges into an endless white desert. Horizons stretch beyond the frame, resisting containment. We see soil patches, streams of water, flows of ice melting into motion—massive walls of time made visible through sediment and thaw. Nothing but ice, water, and soil. Gradually, a subtle green smear appears on the frame: lichen. A quiet emergence. A sign of life—fragile, persistent, almost imperceptible. As scholar Vincent Zonca notes, lichen is “familiar to everyone, known to no one”—a symbiosis of fungus and algae that defies easy categorization.1
Around the midpoint of the film, the landscape shifts dramatically. We move from Antarctic ice to the still waters of a mangrove. The scene is bathed in dystopic, otherworldly tones—unnatural greens and oranges rendered by the infrared camera. The effect is disorienting, almost dreamlike, producing a diatonic sensation: a space unmoored from linear time. A motorboat glides through the frame, cutting through the thick silence. We are no longer in a recognizable geography, but in a landscape that feels alien—unreal, suspended, uncanny.
Then, the coast: houses half-submerged, caught in ruins. Signs of abandonment linger—collapsed walls, water-logged interiors, vegetation overtaking what remains. The mangrove gives way to human traces overtaken by water, a haunting image of erosion and displacement. Here, the film collapses any remaining illusion of separation between human and environmental crisis. What once was home is now debris—memory dissolved into landscape.
While La marcha del liquen is visually striking—particularly through its use of infrared imagery that renders landscapes in eerie, otherworldly tones in the film’s second half—the sound is equally significant. The film’s sonic architecture is not simply illustrative or atmospheric; it is constitutive of its meaning. Ximena’s collaborator, sound artist Carlos Edelmiro, provides layered soundscapes: rushing water, wind, distant voices, and moments of resonant silence. His interventions craft an acoustic world where the boundaries between human and nonhuman, present and past, dissolve.
The film’s sonic landscape unfolds in layers, beginning with wind—swirling, constant, elemental. It evokes the presence of natural forces beyond human control: low-frequency resonances, metallic reverberations, the echo of footsteps over compacted snow, and the intermittent drip of melting ice. These drops accumulate into something almost like white noise—a vacuum, though not quite a void. Sound oscillates. Wind returns. Water washes against a shore. A distant bird calls. These mixed signals compose a glacial symphony of collapse: trembling metal, water crashing, the sharp crack of breaking matter. Sound builds until it takes over the frame—resonant, invasive, forcing attunement.
By minute fourteen, we enter another world. Tropical birds call out. Water slows. A motorboat hums. Insects vibrate around the mangrove. Here, too, sound is distorted, as if filtered through a warped temporal field. The infrared imagery renders the scene in surreal, dystopic tones, and the sonic environment mirrors this strangeness. “Ser parte de algo que ya no está, eso nos ha enseñado el mar,” says a voice in Yokot’an (To be part of something that is no longer, that is what the sea has taught us). The inclusion of Yokot’an—an Indigenous Mayan language spoken in Tabasco—grounds the film in a history of territorial and cultural survival, asserting Indigenous presence in landscapes threatened by rising seas.
Water becomes static. Ruins emerge. Words float like fragments of a poem: Todo se volvió playa y mar. Solo escombros. Only beach and sea remain. Only rubble. The sound of ice walls cracking at the poles begins to resemble the sound of collapsing homes in El Bosque—fragile structures touched, then claimed, by the rising sea. In Ximena’s work, sound is not just accompaniment; it is memory, premonition, and the material trace of planetary grief. Spoken language becomes another mode of attunement—vibrational, embodied, and resistant to assimilation. It amplifies the film’s commitment to multisensory storytelling and reminds us that creative disturbances do not only arise through imagery or sound design, but also through the presence of voices that have long been silenced or ignored. Spoken softly, language grounds the film’s poetics of survival and memory, reminding us that loss and resilience are intertwined. Language, like lichen, persists quietly at the margins.
This is an audiovisual language of what Rob Nixon calls slow violence—a kind of environmental destruction that happens gradually, often invisibly, and over long periods of time. Unlike spectacular disasters that make headlines, slow violence moves slowly and quietly. It affects the most vulnerable: the poor, the racialized, the marginalized. In La marcha del liquen, Tania Ximena focuses on stillness, emptiness, and slow change. She gives us the time and space to feel what climate collapse looks and sounds like as it quietly unfolds.
Rather than offer an urgent call to action, La marcha del liquen unsettles and disorients. It gestures toward a different kind of future—one built not on dominance, but on attentiveness, care, and relation. In a world hungry for immediate answers and dramatic narratives, Ximena offers something harder but ultimately more rewarding: the slow, persistent work of noticing.
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Endnotes
Amanda Macedo Macedo