What do we have at hand? ^08.02.22

Reading(with) Mónica Rodríguez y Jorge González

Puerto Rican artists Mónica Rodríguez and Jorge González's collaborative practice explores reading aloud with others alongside manual practice, artisanal knowledge, and histories of autonomous education. Mónica and Jorge’s practice draws on histories of reading together in the Caribbean region, centring on the figure of Luisa Capetillo (1879-1922), a Puerto Rican feminist, anarchist, labour organiser, and writer who worked as a lectora (reader) in tobacco factories of the time. Self-taught and operating outside traditional educational institutions while creating spaces for collective learning, Capetillo is an apt figure for Mónica and Jorge, whose practice consciously references and extends this tradition.

^^Mónica y Jorge contributed a collection of texts to the Mundos habitables library that were read as part of the program, Promesa de mayo: cantamos para morir | y vivir (May, 2022) in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
See them here

~^Susie Quillinan: What was the seed of the proposal to bring together collective and out-loud readings with artisanal processes?

~^Mónica Rodríguez: In 2013-14, Jorge and I were in Puerto Rico doing the Beta Local practice program. We were both in the program and Jorge that year was starting to do all his research and work on Escuela de oficio, and I was researching the history of the labour movement in Puerto Rico, and in that research we came across the readings at Las Tabacaleras. We knew the figure of Luisa Capetillo, but we didn't actually know much beyond the fact that she was a feminist, a Puerto Rican writer.

And so we came across this activity of readings in the tobacco factories. We were also reading a lot of Ivan Illich that year and all about his proposal for decolonisation. So then with all that we were learning about Illich and with what Jorge was doing—learning about and searching for the different artisanal practices in Puerto Rico—the idea of weaving became the beginning of how to unite and weave together different practices. The out-loud and collective readings made a lot of sense to us. The manual work and process of weaving allows you to have this mental space to listen—just like with the tobacco workers when they were rolling.

~^Jorge González: Beta Local was the space where we could approach questions of how we can we extend ourselves critically. How can we sustain a research process from a space that thought about the very structure of learning itself? And at that moment Beta Local was deeply immersed in Illich's thinking. Sofia Olascoaga's research about the community in which Ivan Illich participated here in Puerto Rico, was a very broad mapping. It was super beautiful to see that his reference to the island was from his time in New York with Puerto Rican communities before his arrival in Puerto Rico.

Escuela de oficios is inspired by a relationship to learning that doesn't seek professionalisation. From that space of coexistence and critical thinking of the body, we are relating to Ivan Illich and from there arises the question: What do we have at hand? Approaching artisanal knowledge on the island, which is deteriorating and neglected, is a way of being able to reexamine truth, it’s a looking from another place. For me, the Escuela de oficios project was my way of responding, with the tools I have, to propose a regeneration.

And it was beautiful that at that moment, when Mónica and I started working together on reading and weaving, there was a text we found called "Buscando el bejuco,"buscando el bejuco Buscando el bejuco [Looking for the Vine] which is written by a basket maker. It's very beautiful to see how he recognized the harvest as another way of making that is not so well known, but which is what the basket maker enjoys when he knows the environment where he harvests very well. It's a space where the basket maker has knowledge of other plants that accompany him. It speaks to an ecological consciousness that was present in each being.

It was very beautiful that we opened space for reading and making with this text. That was Mónica. Mónica's research is what gives rise to this complementing of knowledges; what Mónica presents as that space of formation, of education that informs workers. It's a genealogy for self-directed education. And the beautiful thing is that I since 2014 Mónica and I have continued collaborating each year in our process.

~^Susie: I'm very interested in how you read not only with others, but also with spaces and other practices. After so many years of reading and making alongside these texts, how has your relationship to the texts evolved?

~^Jorge: Well, I continue learning and within this entire learning process, understanding our relationship keeps growing in a colonial context where knowledge is tied to oppression. And now I feel that this possibility of resignifying these knowledges that we have inherited is truly happening—knowledges that have survived, knowledges that have gone through transformations.

The relationship with fibers in the artisanal context has transformed and this walking alongside an artisanal community has been  very beautiful. It’s been reinforced based on a closeness with people who belong to the indigenous community, their relationship with knowledge, their relationship with identifying elements of survival and also elements of understanding ourselves as part of a region.

The relationship with fibers in the artisanal context has been transformed. And it's very beautiful, this walking alongside an artisanal community that has been strengthened based on there being a real proximity to the people who belong to the indigenous community of the island. Their relationship with knowledge, their relationship also with identifying elements of survival and also elements of understanding ourselves as part of a region, this displacing of official historical narratives. What is our relationship with the ancestrality of the region? It's through artisanal communities that we have been able to understand up close that diversity of the different ways of understanding the world, different cosmologies.

And Mónica has been working with the nationalist workers' movement and something beautiful about Capetillo was her will to found an agricultural school, and that has also been very inspiring.

~^Mónica: The figure of Capetillo has always served us as a starting point. She addresses so many things in her practice, but also in her life and her bibliography, that it always allows us to keep opening more connecting paths – her life and her practice as a reader in the Tobacco factory, but also as a union activist and her whole way of thinking, and also education. She educated herself; she was always also fighting against [professionalization]. This is seen in her writing, in her work. She emigrated to the United States, worked in the United States, she had a restaurant there. It was one of the first vegetarian restaurants in New York. She converted her house into a hostel. Her whole life and her work always allows us to keep connecting with others and thinking not only of rescuing traditions but of our very history, because as a colonized country we are constantly searching and learning. These reading processes also allows us to keep searching for these other figures that have been silenced and learn about them and their work.

So, we always make a selection of Capetillo's texts, but complemented by other writers – usually Puerto Rican, Caribbean writers that complement Capetillo’s texts and the specificity of the project being worked on or the exhibition being worked on at that moment.

~^Jorge:  One reading we did was a closed workshop here in my studio with a group of Ernesto Pujol’s students. Ernesto is an older artist who has influenced our generation and who returns to the island and is working the land through a practice close to gardening. And well, various artists had the opportunity to receive him [and his students]. Among them was the Department of Food project, which is a space that resonates with queer thought and its relationship to land and ecology, and it's very present alongside Luisa Capetillo’s approach – a person who embodies diversity and the struggle for social justice in its multiple expressions. And that group was very beautiful because we were reading "Humanity in the Future" [by Luisa Capetillo], and it's a very special text. A text of great humanity, of understanding oneself within all living forms.

And after the workshop concluded—which was a clay stomping workshop, experimenting with construction using earth, with adobe—this queer student, who had encountered Luisa Capetillo for the first time, understood a desire and intention to believe in a queer future, an anti-patriarchal queer future. That's super valuable. I keep learning.

~^Susie: Are there any protocols or certain forms that you always employ to open up these spaces of reading and making?

~^Mónica: Jorge always starts with an introduction and then we basically talk about the project process. We always invite people to read. The idea is that it's not only us, but always in the place where we invite different people to read. Between the two of us we make the selection of texts that we're going to be reading.

~^Jorge: We present the resource, we have worked with different fibers, but we started with the vine. For me the text "El Monte" by Lydia Cabrera, which is a text that Mónica introduced me to, is a fundamental text on the theme of botany in the Caribbean and its practices within African diaspora religion.

We always weave something. Sometimes we work on a collective basket. On other occasions with an artesan accompanying us, each person ends up with a weaving, everyone ends up with their own basket. Sometimes the artisan has accompanied us to the public presentations. And these are long-term commitments, each relationship, is a long-term commitment.

The last one we had was with tallow candles and it opened up into a relation about taking care of an altar and from there we explored the calendar, annual cycles. It was a way to share about tallow candles which are prepared for the Day of the Dead. We looked toward that space of inviting our dead to participate; to participate in our struggle, participate in our intentions. So every conversation is very precise, every accompaniment is very…

~^Mónica: Is very specific. I think it’s always been very specific to the moment and the place where the activity is happening. We have made workshops with reading, where we learn with an artisan. Everyone learns to make these types of objects and we read as we go. There have been other moments where we all sit together and read together.

We always use texts, we choose some texts from Capetillo that serve us as a starting point to then look for other texts that accompany those, that can be read together and that go with the specific activity being done or the theme being worked on.

Usually we make a selection and make a photocopy and and distributed them. Texts are also repeated in different events, but they're accompanied by other texts from other writers, and that changes. So the meanings are changing according to the way we create relationships [with other texts].

~^Susie: Creating a weaving of Luisa's texts with other voices.

~^Mónica: Yes. There's a text I read by her in which she talks about her writing almost like a spider's web. That's a weaving... she herself recognizes her writing as weaving.

~^Jorge: Thinking of the text and the body, there's something about Luisa Capetillo that we haven’t explored and that's her relationship with Cartesian spiritualism. That’s an important exemplar within Capetillo's Library. It's interesting how she, as an anarchist woman, how she identified with these principles detached from material value.

And then, how do we receive the Caribbean, which in truth, goes through different places? This multiple ancestrality and relationships with our dead. And also the implications of the body, the voice, how the voice of the text is activated. How we assume, that temporality is very powerful. Just as space is very powerful with each community. And then how it resonates in other communities is also super beautiful.

~^Susie: How do you think about what happens or is made or can be learned from those practices?

~^Mónica: Well for me it has always been more of a relearning, not only in terms of collective points from the same history, from what is being read and what is being worked on. It’s a new way of relating to the text being read, to that new connection that is made between what Capetillo is writing about with this other text being read alongside.

~^Jorge: And well... I think about how in Mónica's practice the relationship with the text is super rich. She spends a lot of time with the text before sharing it. Mónica spends a lot of time with the text, she takes it on, she enters into the drawing-making process and I can momentarily relate it to my relationship with fiber, with making. That's how we each prepare. Mónica in her workspace prepares the moment [of encounter with the text] and likewise, I feel that the space of Escuela de oficios is a very intimate space that has its moments of opening to the collective at specific times.

~^Mónica: There's this kind of hope for...

~^Jorge: generating excuses to accompany each other.

~^Mónica: Exactly. It's a way to accompany each other.