About the project
My practice as an artist has enabled the creation of a practical platform called Escuela de Oficios, that weaves an ongoing creation of a collective learning space. Participants engage in mapping, documenting, and employing artisanal techniques. Thus, conforming to a mobile program that progresses through conversations, workshops, and exhibitions. Through these activities, distribution of knowledge–ranging from oral history, ancestral techniques, and collective practices–is articulated and shared with and among the participants. From this approach, connections on self-management education models are being explored, emphasizing on convivial and communal forms of production.
For Visible, we are defining Pueblo Indio, a site-specific project that stems from Escuela de Oficios work with the *Pueblo Indio community, Canóvanas, Puerto Rico. Our relationship with this community is based on the recognition of their wetlands, through the sourcing of plant material and weaving knowledge that we sustain. Towards this development, we are putting forth the creation of a field station to strive to understand natural processes at every scale.
Escuela de Oficios: Pueblo Indio develops as a design process that experiments with form, concepts, territories, and materials. Significant contributors are crafters and native researchers, as well as their families, with whom we have learned to acknowledge our territory, by understanding their role in society as an intersection of various systems of knowledge. We pursue this goal embedded in the natural resource dimension of peoples’ rights. Moreover, we seek to continue to our efforts to further advance in our self-determination.
*Pueblo Indio translates to indigenous peoples.
The project took place in Canóvanas, Ciales, Cidra, Morovis, Naranjito, San Juan, San Sebastian, in Puerto Rico.
About the artist
Jorge González’s practice serves as a platform for the recuperation of marginalized vernacular material culture in an attempt to produce new narratives between the indigenous and the modern.
In 2014, he founded Escuela de Oficios, an underlying support structure, which responded to omission in history, spaces of abandonment, and deteriorating academic spaces; by proposing a recovery through a process that generates continuity of techniques forgotten by the amnesia of colonization.