\u00bbGod\u00ednez Niv\u00f3n's working method has two key elements: first, he confronts the hegemonic structure of knowledge by bringing nonrational knowledge into the education system. (...) Through the second element in God\u00ednez Niv\u00f3n\u2019s working method, he expands the visibility for the Indigenous situated knowledge production through communication that happens as an outcome of the educational process. He creates a context-specific response in medium and format to each of his projects.\u00ab<\/blockquote>\r\nWorking with the group and attending the Assembly, the artist took part in tequio<\/em> as an educational process similar to the inference between commoning and variation that Ingold understand as education. Through this method using Tequiograf\u00edas,<\/em> God\u00ednez Niv\u00f3n gave a platform to tequio <\/em>as localized knowledge of the AMI, both as collective thinking and as a working process. Later on, God\u00ednez Niv\u00f3n spoke with the nearby stationery store to sell Tequiograf\u00edas <\/em>and convinced elementary school directors and teachers to use them in their teaching. The artist made the Ministry of Public Education adopt Tequiograf\u00edas <\/em>in Indigenous teachers\u2019 work in some states in Mexico. God\u00ednez Niv\u00f3n gave agency to Indigenous knowledge through Tequiograf\u00edas<\/em>, turning them into what Donna Haraway calls situated knowledge by directly confronting the official education system through these objects.4<\/sup> After this project, God\u00ednez Niv\u00f3n made tequio<\/em> part of his work. Although he does not claim to practice tequio<\/em>, it became an ethical way for him to move in and through life, to collaborate and create with others. For God\u00ednez Niv\u00f3n, there is continuous learning from and with others through the mode of Assembly, which he learned from tequio<\/em>. His process is not necessarily a trajectory of bettering a craft or success; instead, it is about becoming more aware of the multicultural tools one can access in their context.\r\n\r\nTequiograf\u00edas<\/em> meet with the hegemonic system of education through modes of dissemination. How does God\u00ednez Niv\u00f3n use the situated knowledge of Indigenous communities in Mexico\u2019s official school system? For him, the school serves three functions: a place of tension, the discovery of experiences, and legitimization. According to him \u00bbit is not the system of education that is the major flaw, but we should change people\u2019s ethics and intensions within them.\u00ab5<\/sup><\/a>"},{"acf_fc_layout":"content_img","acfe_flexible_layout_title":"Bild(er)","bgcolor":"","bgcolor_custom":"","layout_col_size":8,"img_gallery":false,"img":[28065],"img_gallery_format":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content_txt","acfe_flexible_layout_title":"Text","bgcolor":"","bgcolor_custom":"","layout_col_size":8,"txt_cols":"is-1-txtcol","txt":"In his project Oneirical Propaedeutic<\/em> (2017) the confrontation that created situated knowledge happened through bringing Indigenous epistemologies directly into the educational circuit. During the two-and-a- half-year period of participatory work, God\u00ednez Niv\u00f3n worked with twelve teenage girls at the Yolia orphanage in Mexico City. He was invited to do an art piece through an art foundation that had previously done workshops in the building. Tequio<\/em> was the initial inspiration for the work. The question was how to bring a group of individuals together by understanding tension through communication. Through a series of participatory process and workshops, God\u00ednez Niv\u00f3n established a commoning and variations between the students. After trying out many different practices, later in the process, the artist introducted the idea of dream propaedeutic. Learning through dreams emerged when he created the Teqiuografia<\/em> on health. He met with a group of midwives from the triqiu<\/em> tribe in Oaxaca, the only matriarchal society within Mexico. These women learned about their healing practice through dream propaedeutic. Using the midwives\u2019 Indigenous teaching and learning method, primarily based on meditative exercise, he organized dream workshops with the girls; consisting of regular meetings at Yolia on Sunday, and a weekly collective dream encounter on Wednesday night. God\u00ednez Niv\u00f3n found it essential to introduce the girls to the midwives\u2019 role as \u00bbwomen of knowledge, women of power, their sensitivity with their strategies.\u00ab6<\/sup>\r\n\u00bbThe flaws of Mexican education, mostly present in rural Indigenous schools and how they communicate, are represented in the school system. Within the idea of a progressive country that the Mexican state has long tried to implement, these groups are often portrayed as backward.\u00ab<\/blockquote>\r\nAfter six months, the dream process proved fruitful, as each participant started to dream of flowers, which became their common language. They began to work on the relationship between plants and dreams, and the plants soon lost their resemblance to reality. The students shared their experiences and God\u00ednez Niv\u00f3n got different experts on board from various fields as biology, agronomy, and botany. Eventually, the dream workshop turned into something that was not just about dreams, but situated knowledge of midwifery; the healing process was confronted with scientific and academic narratives of expertise. Through his instigation, the artist managed to bring scientists from the university into the process. The scientific establishment engaging with the plants found in girls\u2019 dreams is a subversive act against productivity that is so often valued in hegemonic education"},{"acf_fc_layout":"content_img","acfe_flexible_layout_title":"Bild(er)","bgcolor":"","bgcolor_custom":"","layout_col_size":8,"img_gallery":true,"img":[28053,28057],"img_gallery_format":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content_txt","acfe_flexible_layout_title":"Text","bgcolor":"","bgcolor_custom":"","layout_col_size":8,"txt_cols":"is-1-txtcol","txt":"The eventual outcome of the work was I remember the day I was born. Will be tomorrow, <\/em>a poem documentary about a sculpture garden that will last for 5,000 years, made after the girls\u2019 dream flowers on the mountain Iztacc\u00edhuatl (a Nahuatl word that means \u00bbsleeping woman\u00ab). The girls can see the mountain from Yolia\u2019s roof, where they looked at it while \u00bbmoon bathing.\u00ab God\u00ednez Niv\u00f3n held some of the last dream workshops on the roof (he'd commissioned a staircase so the girls could access it safely). The garden was created to close the project; the art faculty\u2019s students made the sculpture together as per the girls\u2019 instructions. The documentary functions as a dream sequence about how the girls\u2019 dream flowers transformed into sculptures. In the beginning, the students fall asleep on the roof only to wake up in the mountains and find the clay flowers to organize them into a garden. In the background, a collectively created poem with the same title as the film is read out by a participant. The film does not show every element of the process, but communicates through poetry.7<\/sup>\r\n\r\nKaz\u00e1<\/em>, formerly known as Bede<\/em>, is a collaborative project between Daniel God\u00ednez Niv\u00f3n and fellow artist Amauta Garc\u00eda. The two have been working with schools around the state of Guanajuato through experimental educational processes since 2015.8<\/sup> In the region, for many students and parents, Indigeneity is part of oppression, and many families would not teach their own culture, nor would students want to learn about it. Misi\u00f3n de Arnedo was seen by outside locals as a \u00bbwitches\u2019 town\u00ab due to the women\u2019s healing qualities and botanical knowledge in the area. Many of the students felt distanced from Indigenous culture due to this negative subjugation. As he did at Yolia in his educational process, God\u00ednez Niv\u00f3n often invites local experts to hold classes during his workshops. To subvert the negative image, Garc\u00eda and God\u00ednez Niv\u00f3n invited healer women to the school so the students can see that their mothers, aunts, and grandmothers have \u00bbhands that could heal.\u00ab9<\/sup> By directly addressing the community\u2019s tension, the artist dismantled the idea of the witches as \u00bbother\u00ab and legitimized the Indigenous situated knowledge through the school system.\r\n\r\nThe flaws of Mexican education, mostly present in rural Indigenous schools and how they communicate, are represented in the school system. Within the idea of a progressive country that the Mexican state has long tried to implement, these groups are often portrayed as backward. In school, real indignity is never connected to the contemporary population but to the glorified, pyramid-building Maya and Aztec past. Children working in the fields are always understood as negative. The education system fails to recognize other learning methods that can happen through these processes and what children can learn about their environment.10<\/sup> The daily reality of many Indigenous communities has been severely affected by the escalating climate crisis. This requires promoting Indigenous situated knowledge within schools to fight against these environmental threats.\r\n\r\n<\/a>"},{"acf_fc_layout":"content_img","acfe_flexible_layout_title":"Bild(er)","bgcolor":"","bgcolor_custom":"","layout_col_size":8,"img_gallery":true,"img":[28061,28070],"img_gallery_format":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content_txt","acfe_flexible_layout_title":"Text","bgcolor":"","bgcolor_custom":"","layout_col_size":8,"txt_cols":"is-1-txtcol","txt":"Kaz\u00e1 <\/em>finished each year with a documentary made by the artists focusing on a specific aspect of life in the schools, with a gradual shift in focus toward rituals and practices around the cultivation of nature. As the region of the Sierra Gorda mountain range in Guanajuato has been hit by continuous years of drought due to the long-lasting effect of the now-closed mining industry, the documentaries recently took a poetic turn. La Casa del Agua<\/em> (2019) tells the story about water\u2019s birth; how it searches for a home as a comet flying in space. Eventually, it lands on Earth where it brings life and prosperity after which animals honor the \u00bbhouse of water\u00ab by offering something to it each year. The poem, documentary, and story were made through a participatory process by the children from the workshop at Miguel Hidalgo Elementary school in Misi\u00f3n de Arnedo. They created the costumes, choreography, and storyline, and wrote the short poem narrated in the film. As a preparation during the Assemblies that followed the tequio<\/em> format, Garc\u00eda and God\u00ednez Niv\u00f3n asked the children to write haikus inspired by Japanese ecopoetry, thinking about the local animals and plants and how these would give offerings to their environment. After writing the poems, the children each chose an animal and impersonated it, turning the Assembly into animals, not students. Connecting Haraway\u2019s situated knowledge to posthumanist thinking is crucial in developing different ways of knowing by understanding how to connect with flora and fauna surrounding our local area, and bringing out more complex situated knowledge. The promotion of practices from another society, such as Japanese ecopoetry, does not ignore the idea of local-based experience. By introducing strategies from the outside that can be relatable in another context, the artist stimulated the students to relate to their surroundings and environment while developing new ways of thinking.\r\n\r\nWhere so far I have described the educational process that happens within shared social environments, I should discuss the role of sharing these experiences with a wider public and how it affects further God\u00ednez Niv\u00f3n\u2019s artistic process. As Jos\u00e9 Miguel Gonz\u00e1lez Casanova writes, artists should not only be concerned with the production of artworks, but they should also be aware of other elements of their process, such as distribution and perception. However, these aspects are not necessarily in the central scope of most artistic processes. By considering these stages together, an artist can expand the field of visibility for the heterotopia art creates, through different communication forms.11<\/sup>\r\n\r\nGod\u00ednez Niv\u00f3n views the creation of an artwork as an honoring of the correspondence method; however, sharing an outcome does not occupy a highlighted spot in his process. He equally weights the three aspects highlighted by Casanova, and he has a deep understanding of the economic system that supports art and network where the dissemination of works occurs. God\u00ednez Niv\u00f3n's working method has two key elements: first, he confronts the hegemonic structure of knowledge by bringing nonrational knowledge into the education system. He invited the triqui<\/em> midwives to the teenage girls\u2019 class to show different modes of female empowerment to the students. During the workshop he held at a high school in Guanajuato, students could learn from the experiences of healer women from the local community, to fight against the Indigenous students\u2019 negative perception of their indignity. By bringing the knowledge already present in the community to the official school, the artist legitimized the situated knowledge in the students' eyes.\r\n\r\nThrough the second element in God\u00ednez Niv\u00f3n\u2019s working method, he expands the visibility for the Indigenous situated knowledge production through communication that happens as an outcome of the educational process. He creates a context-specific response in medium and format to each of his projects. The artist balances the use of translation and poetic device in his work, depending on where it will be disseminated. By doing so, he empowers but does not fully expose the identity of the participants in his projects. The use of these two outcomes in his work depends on the artist\u2019s primary audience for the work and how they will be utilizing it.\r\n\r\nTequiograf\u00edas<\/em> are traditional school materials that are not controlled by the Ministry of Public Education and are directly used by Indigenous schools as a didactic device for students to understand their heritage. The use of translation here was not for the hegemony to better appreciate its subject, but instead as an educational tool to fight against forgetting languages and presenting cultural diversity. The primary mode of distribution of these works was not through the art world, but through stationery shops. Although it would be false to state that these images are not aesthetic objects in themselves, their low price and wider availability escape the art market's commodifying frame.\r\n\r\nWhen the work is to be used in art institutional context, God\u00ednez Niv\u00f3n usually works with myth or mythmaking as a poetic device in different mediums. I\u00f1igo Clavo talks about confessional ontology, the Western colonial desire for transparency, \u00bbwhere to know also involves a certain ownership of things, nature, and other humans \u2013 the Western fantasy for control, in this ontology, extracting secrets is an important part of maintaining power.\u00ab12<\/sup> In response to this, I\u00f1igo Clavo refers to \u00c9douard Glissant\u2019s idea of the right to opacity, that by maintaining a level of abstraction and not knowing, we can defend the incomprehensible.13<\/sup>\u00a0 To communicate, I\u00f1igo Clavo reaches for De Sousa Santos: we should use poetry as its the few places in Western modernity where opacity is validated.14<\/sup> According to Tim Ingold referring to Foster, anthropological artwork should not be complicit in marking things and placing them into a context. This process will lead to further marginalization of the subject.15<\/sup> By practicing the right to opacity, God\u00ednez Niv\u00f3n\u2019s work steps forward from the artist ethnographer of the 1990s as he avoids identifying things through his use of poetry and symbolic meaning.\u00a0 Both in the case of I remember the day I was born. Will be tomorrow <\/em>(2017) and La Casa del Agua<\/em> (2019\/2020), God\u00ednez Niv\u00f3n utilized this right to opacity through the poem-documentary format. However, he does not fail to communicate and share something about and with the group he was working with. First, by creating a collective memory site through the film and the sculpture garden made out of dream flowers, he mythologizes the educational process. La Casa del Agua <\/em>indirectly shows the way Kaz\u00e1<\/em> made the students engage and create new forms of situated knowledge by giving agency to flora and fauna as well as the environment of their region, through a self-made myth with the use of practices from outside the local knowledge, instigating new ways of thinking.\r\n\r\nTo answer my initial question about how artists can engage with the educational system, God\u00ednez Niv\u00f3n does this through communication and variation in participatory methods. Ingold understands education\u2019s role in the same way. The artist understanding of tequio<\/em> underlines the process as an ethical position, meaning that the common benefit gives a sense of belonging to one's work and effort. His approach is based on the eagerness to wonder about something that one does not know. He arrives in each situation with a specific type of naivete and willingness to adapt to the group he works with. God\u00ednez Niv\u00f3n\u2019s practice uses a poetic approach to instigate new modes of thinking and find tensions between different group members through dialogue, to imagine, through art, something that was not visible before. By creating assemblies, he realizes the tensions and common elements within a group. He aims for people to be invested in something already present or make a still-nonexistent or imaginary goal for them to invest in. God\u00ednez Niv\u00f3n\u2019s work uses the official system of knowledge production and dissemination as schools, stationery shops providing teaching supplies, or art institutions to contrast objective situated knowledge with the monocultural hegemonic system using translation or poetry, depending on the situation. He pushes toward a multicultural education system where Indigenous knowledge is legitimized, as part of the official structure to legitimize their situated knowledge.\r\n\r\n<\/a>"},{"acf_fc_layout":"content_footnotes","acfe_flexible_layout_title":"Fu\u00dfnoten","bgcolor":"","footnotes_list_hide_numbers":false,"footnotes":[{"footnote":"N\u00e9stor Garc\u00eda Canclini: \u00bbTequiograf\u00edas: Reimaginating Interculturality,\u00ab in: Visibleproject<\/em> (blog), https:\/\/www.visibleproject.org\/blog\/text\/tequiografias-reimaginating-interculturality\/<\/a>, (accessed February 11, 2021)."},{"footnote":"Tim Ingold: Anthropology and\/as Education.<\/em> Abingdon, Oxon, New York 2017."},{"footnote":"Idem., p. 5."},{"footnote":"Donna Haraway: \u00bbSituated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,\u00ab in: Feminist Studies<\/em> 14, no. 3 (1988), pp. 575\u201399."},{"footnote":"Daniel God\u00ednez Niv\u00f3n interviewed by Kriszti\u00e1n G\u00e1bor T\u00f6r\u00f6k, February 2021."},{"footnote":"Daniel God\u00ednez Niv\u00f3n: \u00bbProped\u00e9utico On\u00edrico\/A Dream Propaedeutic \u2013 PSU Art & Social Practice,\u00ab Interview by Spencer Bryne-Seres, http:\/\/psusocialpractice.org\/spencer-byrne-seres-with-daniel-godinez-nivon\/<\/a> (accessed February 9, 2021)."},{"footnote":"The project recently finished Essay on Oneiric Flora, <\/em>2019. The artist further collaborated with biological and computer energies to give life to the girls\u2019 imagined plants through the digital. See \u00bbEnsayo de Flora On\u00edrica \u2013 Daniel God\u00ednez Niv\u00f3n,\u00ab https:\/\/www.danielgodineznivon.com\/Ensayo-de-Flora-Onirica<\/a>, (accessed February 12, 2021)."},{"footnote":"The project that started at Miguel Hidalgo elementary school in San Ildefonso Cieneguilla with the H\u00f1\u00e4h\u00f1\u00fc Indiginous group later continued at the Miguel Hidalgo elementary school in Misi\u00f3n de Arnedo with the Uz\u00e1 group."},{"footnote":"See note 5."},{"footnote":"Mar\u00eda de Ibarrola Nicol\u00edn: \u00bbLos grandes problemas del sistema educativo mexicano,\u00ab in: Perfiles educativos<\/em> 34, no. SPE (2012), pp. 16\u201328; Yolanda Jim\u00e9nez Naranjo and Rosa Guadalupe Mendoza Zuany, \u00bbLa educaci\u00f3n ind\u00edgena en M\u00e9xico: una evaluaci\u00f3n de pol\u00edtica p\u00fablica integral, cualitativa y participativa,\u00ab in: Liminar: estudios sociales y human\u00edsticos<\/em> 14, no. 1 (2016), pp. 60\u201372."},{"footnote":"Jos\u00e9 Miguel Gonz\u00e1lez Casanova: \u00bbForum Arte Vida.\u00ab Mexico City 2003."},{"footnote":"Mar\u00eda I\u00f1igo Clavo: \u00bbTraces, Signs, and Symptoms of the Untranslatable,\u00ab https:\/\/www.e-flux.com\/journal\/108\/325859\/traces-signs-and-symptoms-of-the-untranslatable\/<\/a> (accessed February 12, 2021)."},{"footnote":"\u00c9douard Glissant: Poetics of Relation.<\/em> Ann Arbor 1997, p. 120."},{"footnote":"Bonaventura de Sousa Santos: Renovar la teor\u00eda cr\u00edtica y reinventar la emancipaci\u00f3n social.<\/em> CLACSO, 2006, p. 39."},{"footnote":"See note 2, p. 65; Hal Foster: \u00bbThe Artist as Ethnographer?\u00ab in: The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology.<\/em> Eds. G.E. Marcus and F.R. Myers, Berkeley 1995, pp. 302\u201309."}]}],"intro_preview_headline":"Kriszti\u00e1n G\u00e1bor T\u00f6r\u00f6k","intro_preview_txt":"How do we challenge hegemonic knowledge systems? Which systems, techniques, languages, and methods allow us to describe what surrounds us, and to learn from? These are central questions in this issue of the journal. And this essay, by Kriszti\u00e1n G\u00e1bor T\u00f6r\u00f6k, examines how Daniel God\u00ednez Niv\u00f3n localizes knowledge as a collective thinking and experience process through tequio<\/em> \u2013 a nonformal, noninstitutional, participatory, communal collective working method from Indigenous communities in Mexico. <\/strong><\/span>","intro_preview_img":28059,"post_id_old":"","post_author":null,"post_subtitle":"Kriszti\u00e1n G\u00e1bor T\u00f6r\u00f6k","post_preview_img_hide_on_single":true,"post_txt_old":"","post_pdf":null,"post_copyright":"ccl_default","translated_post":false,"translations":null,"post_copyright_individual":"","post_related_posts":[27847,28022,27911],"related_posts_post":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28052","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28052"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28052\/revisions"}],"acf:post":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27911"},{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28022"},{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27847"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28052"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"project","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/project?post=28052"},{"taxonomy":"project_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/project_type?post=28052"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}