PROYECTOS PARALELOS
Chasen Thajni is a collective entity, created in 2019 at the initiative of the artist Ulises Matamoros Ascención. It is currently composed of members of his Ngiba community and external collaborators. In 2019, the artist, together with various residents of Ahuatempan, built an open community space inspired by traditional Ngiba architecture. Thus, Chasen Thajni emerged—first as a collaborative architectural project that appropriated a public space, and later as a popular collective tasked with restoring the Ngiba voice, word, and presence: a presence silenced beneath layers of ethnic-racial, religious, linguistic, and wartime violence.
The ultimate goal of Chasen Thajni is to create and activate spaces of enunciative autonomy, self-determination, and self-representation, through the restitution, recovery, formulation, safeguarding, articulation, and reclamation of knowledge rooted in our ancestral knowledges.
Chasen Thajni is organized around a popular committee that holds community assemblies and makes collective decisions. This committee commissions and assigns various projects in accordance with a central axis of work. These projects are carried out by mixed working groups (composed of community members and external agents). The assigned tasks are developed through our four “community action programs,” working with methodological, artistic, and pedagogical tools interwoven with ancestral and transdisciplinary knowledges.
A project created by the artist Ulises Matamoros Ascención and curated by Michel Blancsubé.
El límite de lo propio emerged as a platform to foster face-to-face dialogues among diverse forms of knowledge, and to identify—or provoke—points of convergence and disagreement; crossing the boundaries of what is considered one’s own in order to inhabit territories of otherness, and to encounter within them questions or answers that lie beyond our epistemological limits.
During 2022–2024, the invited artists visited the community of Santa Inés Ahuatempan in two periods and developed their projects through methodological, artistic, and pedagogical tools, interwoven with ancestral and transdisciplinary knowledges, in order to achieve a face-to-face dialogue between Ngiba knowledges and diverse ways of thinking. They also carried out close cooperation and collaborative work with various members of the community, who provided accommodation, meals, as well as social integration, accompaniment, and community-based guidance.
LOS TIEMPOS DE NUESTRA LENGUA ARTISTIC AND COMMUNITY DIGITAL REPOSITORY
This website is a community-based and artistic digital repository that brings together six years of work and research centered on the “Ngiba of the western region” language. It is a collective, intimate, and rigorous effort led by the artist Ulises Matamoros Ascención, in collaboration with his own community: the Ngiba neighborhoods of San Antonio Tierra Colorada and San Antonio Tierra Negra, in Santa Inés Ahuatempan (Puebla, Mexico).
In this sense, the repository Los tiempos de nuestra lengua. No one bears witness for the witness proposes the socialization, development, and continuity of the experiences that have emerged around Chasen Thajni, and aims to safeguard memory, foster dissemination, and—crucially—encourage collaboration (a fundamental element for nourishing and expanding the site). It is a project in constant growth and in ongoing search of alliances: not only within the community of Ahuatempan, but also with other people and communities—distant or disparate—who share a reflective, critical, honest, and intense exploration of memory, lived experience, and an awareness of the impossibility of total representation when translating across different linguistic margins.
More than a digital platform, it is a constellation of materials that resist forgetting and celebrate the power of language, listening, and Ngiba writing. This expanding archive does not seek to represent the community, but rather to make space for its ways of speaking, remembering, and orienting itself. Because no one bears witness for the witness, yet we can create the conditions for voices and their echoes to have multiple places in which to appear, to connect, and to enter into dialogue.
This project is not only a linguistic record, but a bridge between worlds. It is a guide that seeks to reveal the intellectual richness of living within distinct linguistic margins. Moreover, it is an act of sharing with others an endangered language that needs to be preserved…
Our sincerest gratitude to Gwaertler Stiftung, whose generous support—through the Gwaertler Grant 2025—made the creation and realization of this website possible.
We also extend our deepest thanks to Chasen Thajni, which was and continues to be the inexhaustible axis that keeps us together: a space of encounter, memory, and collective action, from which the questions and affects that sustain this project continue to emerge.
PERMANENT SEMINAR
ART AND ARCHIVE. MEMORY, TRACE, AND ASH
The emergence of the archive and the subsequent “archival turn” have profoundly transformed artistic practices and their critique. Archive fever, as it might be called, has led to a reconfiguration of the conceptual margins within which artistic creation is situated, as well as the ways in which it is analyzed and interpreted. In this context, the archive becomes a fundamental tool not only for the preservation of and access to data, but also as an artistic strategy that generates complex discursive systems.
This seminar proposes an in-depth study of the archive from multiple theoretical perspectives. It will examine the sources and genealogies that have shaped the conceptualization of the archive, as well as the work of artists who employ the archive as a strategy for constructing their discourses. The theoretical approach will encompass major historical, historiographical, psychoanalytic, and philosophical currents, offering a comprehensive understanding of how the archive operates and is articulated within the field of art.
