Hands weaving a basket together

Essay

Jorge González: Escuela de Oficios

Michelle Marxuach

Emma Goldman often talked about the importance of living the truth, as opposed to just theorizing about it, and about her position toward the forms of organization that can be created by the natural mixture of common interests and voluntary union. According to her: “We could organize the activity of free human beings analogously to the spirit of harmonious solidarity that grows organically producing a variety of colors and shapes as the one that originates in the varied set that we admire in flowers.”[2]

Embracing mediation as a methodology to ignite proactive forms that re-narrate and reinstitute the inherent rights of other beings and etnias (ethnicities) in a place that has historically continued to implement forms of eradication is part of Escuela de Oficios. Through practices that convert processes into action, and then into advocacy, Jorge González’s meditation “is not only a methodology but a way to propose new ways of promoting principles of growth and cultivation rooted in our land and its connection to the vibration of the earth.”[3]

Eight years ago, Jorge González began another story with a community that claimed an other form of knowledge building. I was part of it. Through its ongoing transformative platform of research and practice, Escuela de Oficios taught me to relate with our history again using materials that carry the underlying support structure of learning processes that expose critical issues about our form of production.

Escuela de Oficios has delved into deliberate absences,[4] convened to re-learn artisanal skills, and collaborated with artisans and workshops such as Taller Cabachuelas.[5] It has been an example of training and transformation through experiences of collective learning by nurturing and informing a current generation of artists, artisans, and fellow teachers.

They have also collaborated with the organization Can-Jíbaro Indigenous People’s Organization of Boriken (CAN) to reaffirm their claims and re-narrate a story that can guide new actions toward regional and world alliances, setting forth another way of relating to territories and ethnicities.

From the renegotiations of our cultural objects and their relation to the community, to the reclaiming of ancient approaches to preserving our plant-based species, Escuela de Oficios commits to work hand in hand with CAN and other allied organizations to eradicate oppression by claiming spaces and ways of existing through reaffirming indigenousness as an integral component of our society. It is in these social commitments of denunciation and reaffirmation that Escuela de Oficios and Jorge González’s practice merge and become a collective effort in raising the multiple voices that make up our territory. Weaving information and stories, facilitating communal sharing of cultural belongings, learning and doing through de-schooling (like the ones raised by Ivan Illich) or actions (like the ones proposed by initiatives like Under the Mango Tree).[6] Escuela de Oficios takes on a life of its own in the bodies that participate within it.

Escuela de Oficios is a symbolic and practical space for the recuperation of narratives between the indigenous and the modern, and a fertile terrain for the practices that engage us in actions where we can “walk-together.” I could describe Escuela de Oficios and Jorge’s practice as a “walk-together”[7] through applied exercises and investigations in order to learn differently, hear other voices, and take one another’s steps to keep our bodies in practice and alert—as Urusula K. Le Guin says: “we’ve all let ourselves become part of the killer story, and so we may get finished along with it.”[8]

The ongoing general perception falters, influenced by perverse narrations that continuously enable forms of colonization through processes that eradicate our diversity. When disappearances occur through narratives that continue this pattern of homogenization, it not only creates a void, but voices cease to exist. By embracing forgotten narratives while we learn to live an other way, we might be able to reclaim our rights and restitute historic narratives that have been silenced. As Jorge mentions: “The indigenous population has not disappeared even if the official history narrates another story.” I will jointly add that neither have the skills needed to embrace the conscious use of materials while keeping our forest alive.

The processes that have silenced and discriminated against the indigenous and African populations in Puerto Rico in the name of progress are urgent issues. These processes are literally embedded into the country’s oppressive education system, from the teaching of indigenous extinction to the understanding of ourselves as a homogeneous people, rather than a region of great biodiversity and of multiple expressions of its peoples. Through alternative critical pedagogies, we can proceed differently and act with the urgency needed to heal our earth, so that we can heal together.

The verb narrare in Latin (to tell) which is derived from the adjective gnarls (knowing or skilled) is a good reference for methodologies that our ancestors have used to guide and express the communal identity and values of our population. Maybe we have forgotten how to listen, or maybe we have misused the practice of the skilled or the narrator: the one who knows that it is not the power of the person who mediates but the harmonious generosity of transmission that gives agency to the narration. Like Mireia Sallares, a voice that contributed to the project, said: “I believe in narration as a possibility to survive death, prohibitions or regulations, or at least a tool to use so that they do not impose the narration on you.”

I believe Escuela de Oficios, along with Jorge González’s practice at large, is an example of how we should embrace and act toward the present future. These forms extend their relations and commitments beyond their field, to organically add and participate with the layering of the understory. This, in turn, can reinstitute that other narration to implement the changes we need so that the other story can be embodied with reassurance and belonging, without faltering in our self-determination to re-negotiate our modernity.

 


Michelle Marxuach lives and works in San Juan, Puerto Rico. She is the co-director and co-founder of Beta-Local. Her practice is born out of an interest to enhance the creative field and encourage interdisciplinary practices that rethink and redesign their own forms and structures to articulate answers and invent solutions to current issues. She believes that creative, aesthetic thinking is essential for healthy social change. From 2005–07 Marxuach took a sabbatical from the field of contemporary art to engage in the restoration and design of a historic structure in Old San Juan, which is now home to the Beta-Local program. From 1999–2004, Marxuach founded and directed the art space, M & M projects, an alternative nonprofit space dedicated to strengthening the production of contemporary art in Puerto Rico and its promotion internationally. As part of the space, she created a workshop for local residents and international artists. Marxuach organized exhibitions at the Fundación Joan Miró, Barcelona; Ex Teresa, Mexico; Museum of Modern Art of Sto. Domingo; and the Museum of Art of Puerto Rico, among others. Her curatorial practice established a forum for dialogue and camaraderie among artists, where projects were discussed and potentiated beyond traditional exhibition spaces.

References
[1]
It is in the dense vegetation of the understory that not only information, but the embodiment of the suppressed story is strengthened through layers of fertile platform so that the hidden, seemingly eradicated stories are able to grow and reclaim their space.
[2] Emma Goldman, Anarquismo y Feminismo.
[3] I would like to share with you a narration by Vince Tao about his experience participating in one of Jorge González’s collective weaving/reading gatherings, Under the Mango Tree. I hope this can relay the importance of joining new threads with this project.

Jorge taught us how to braid rope from common cattails. We learned the craft in pairs—one wove, one supported—as he read us a text titled “Buscando el bejuco” (“Looking for the Vine”). Told from the point of view of a basket weaver walking the island’s thicket, the meditative text guided us through the craftsman’s dilated apprehension of place and time. Following Jorge’s measured speech as we worked the material with our hands, we were braided into the weaver’s rhythms; through his voice we followed the vine. The reading elaborated a contemplative, generous relation to the world embodied in the traditional practice, now nearly disappeared from Puerto Rico by grace of modern life. “When you lose a craft, you lose the vine.” We were implored, or perhaps warned: “Cultivate your vines…” Claudia and I admired our rope—I wove, with more than some trepidation; she very charitably supported, holding the other end—for its many imperfections. Narrow in some parts and plump in others, with intermittent nodes where new vines were woven in, Claudia observed that the rope’s variations recorded our learning of the craft, as well as the beginning of our friendship. Tight, hesitant knots gave way to confident braids, with some loose ends that marked passages when we had momentarily lost our rhythm in conversation.

[4] The disappearances of languages, ethnicities, and entire populations is the best tool that authoritative and oppressive groups have used in order to maintain control and silence that which they don’t want others to hear.
[5] Since 2016, Escuela de Oficios has worked closely with Alice Chéveres, Taíno knowledge holder, and her family’s pottery studio, Taller Cabachuelas, participating in the principles of a practice based on decolonization and self-organized learning. This long-time pedagogically-based collaboration establishes a practical space that links issues around restitution of cultural belongings and natural resources pertaining to Taíno cosmology and territory. Taller Cabachuelas was founded in 1984 by the Chéveres family together with indigenous archaeologist Roberto Martínez-Torres and Taíno knowledge holder Daniel Silva-Pagán. The foundational interests of the native researchers and the Chéveres family focus on cultivating Taíno pottery techniques based on archaeological findings that shed light on the survival of indigenous knowledge of Borikén.
[6] Under the Mango Tree: Sites of Learning is a convening of artist-led initiatives, schools, libraries, and project spaces initiated by Sepake Angiama that have been concerned with forms of collective learning/unlearning, Indigenous knowledges, oral history, and nonhierarchical modes of exchange. Some of these questions continue to ignite the ongoing need to meet together and learn from each other. What is the potential of a site of learning initiated by artists? How do we unlearn and unravel the institution, the curriculum, and the canon? What can we retain from the artisanal skills which are slowly disappearing? How might embodied Indigenous knowledges be shared with non-Indigenous people? How do we unfold discourses that have been obliterated by colonial powers? How do we think through our bodies and develop muscle memory?
[7] Francisco Ramírez Rojas: “Para mi, cuando yo voy a salir, tomo rumbo. Vaya, el día que yo salía pa’ca, voy a los cuatro puntos cardinales, digo, pa’ca es mar, el sol sale aquí y se echa allá, la luna sale aquí y se echa allá. Los miro, les digo: ‘Vengan conmigo, vamos, a volar.’ Yo soy así, siempre hago mis oraciones.”
[8] Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, 150–154.

Related

Assembly, Screening

VLC Forum 2021 Day Five: Escuela de Oficios

Hands weaving a basket together

Oct 16, 2021

Forum

Vera List Center Forum 2021: As for Protocols

Oct 12–Oct 16, 2021

Catalogue

Vera List Center Forum 2021: As for Protocols