Daniel Godínez-Nivón
Since 2010, Daniel Godínez-Nivón has developed his work in specific contexts, primarily indigenous migrant associations in Mexico City, and academic institutions. Daniel has close ties with the Zapotec indigenous migrant community in Juchitán, Oaxaca, in Southwestern Mexico. He uses art history and conceptual art processes linked to drawing, moving images, installation and performance but supplements these tools with tequio a communal, collaborative, and compulsory work system implemented throughout indigenous communities in Mexico Triqui midwives.
Learning from Triqui midwives, he works around collective dreaming, using sleep and dream-sharing as a method since. While at Amant, he will continue this work with participatory, oneiric assemblies to imagine alternative futures and deep resistance together with members of Triquis sin Fronteras (Triquis without borders), a non-profit organization that promotes the culture and identity of the Triqui community in NY.
Nahual, Tequiografía No. 4, 2010 - Ongoing
Meet the Residents: Daniel Godínez Nivón
Amant Associate Curator Ian Wallace speaks with the Mexico City-based Daniel Godinez Nivón about drawing on precolonial modes of collective work, using sleep and dream-sharing as a method of artmaking, and his recent collaborations with Albany’s Triqui community.
Time remaining:
Ian Wallace: Thank you, Daniel, for having me to your studio.
Daniel Godínez Nivón: Thank you, Ian, for your interest, and welcome.
Ian Wallace: Maybe we could start by having you just say a little bit about where you’re coming from, where you were before you came to Amant, and just a little bit about your background and what you do?
Daniel Godínez Nivón: Yes, of course. So my name is Daniel Godínez Nivón. I am a visual artist from Mexico, Mexico City. And this is where I come from, just before coming to New York. And well, my work is pretty grounded in the vast cultural diversity that exists in Mexico. In Mexico, we have 69 different languages, 69 different ethnic groups. And I’ve been working with four of them for the last 15 years”: Zapotecas, Mixes, Mixtecos and Triquis. And the way we work involves a very specific social tool that is called tequio, and that can be expressed as a mandatory compulsory work that you do for the common benefit. And recently, the last seven years, I’ve been working with dreams, because also, this particular group, the Triquis, they know how to dream. They use the experience of dream as a tool, as a collective exercise. So for decision-making and to solve the specific challenges, they dream. And I am also a professor in the university, and I’m a teacher, I do workshops. And for me it’s really important to how to use this sensibility and this other layer of dreams to involve other people to dream, to experience dreams, and to share them with their communities, families, partners.
Ian Wallace: With colonialism in Mexico, European colonization, that idea of tequio kind of got co-opted by the colonial project, and it was sort of repurposed. So now, instead of being about doing work for the good of the community as a whole, it became making a tribute to the European colonizer. So this is all just to say, there’s also sort of, you could say, a de-colonial aspect to that idea of engaging with that indigenous practice?
Daniel Godínez Nivón: Yeah, definitely. The story about tequio is really interesting in the so-called conquest and colonization, because indeed, it became a tributary practice. A tequio would be the working labor of indigenous hands. But the thing is that, in each one of these 69 languages, they have their own ways to express this tequio sensibility, because it’s more than a specific practice or collective work. It’s an ethical approach to the world. It’s a way to position yourself in the world. And it’s different. Each one of these groups could explain it way better than myself. For instance, for the Mixe group, it’s called Wejën Kajën. And Wejën Kajën is a concept that can be expressed as unfolding perception, an unfolding mind through learning and practice. So that’s also the way they express about education, the way they express about community work. So it’s not only the works and specific solving a problem, but it’s also a way to position yourself in the world.
Ian Wallace: Could you say a bit about how you think about your role as an artist, coming in and working with these specific communities? Because, in a way, that’s sort of a contradictory position , because you’re participating, but also always an outsider. I know that you’re working with the Triqui community in Albany, specifically. I’d love to just hear a little bit about how you arrived at this particular community that you’re collaborating with now.
Daniel Godínez Nivón: My family from my mother’s side is from a town on the Oaxaca coast that is called Juchitán. It’s mainly Zapotec, the ethnic group that lives there. And it’s also the only matriarchal society that exists in Mexico. So I come from a family of very strong women And because of the many, many challenges that exist in Mexico, of course in Latin America, a lot of racism and discrimination, young families of migrants, they really want to be separated from their own heritage in order to fit in, in order to get a job, and to have many of the reasons that people have to migrate. It’s because of the lack of possibilities and many other tensions that exists in their own communities, and in Mexico, of course.
So my grandparents didn’t teach the language to my mother and siblings, but I grew up with the stories. Since I was very young, I grew up with all these particularly scary ones, of course, good stories to scare kids in the night, all the granddaughters and the grandsons. But I was really fascinated, and I grew up feeling A lot of pride about my family and all these women in my family. I have 64 people from my family that also migrated throughout the world.
I’m mainly trying to reflect on ways this group has been represented through art and history in Mexico. And you have of course the nationalism agenda from the Moralists, and Diego Rivera, and all those guys that really want to portray indigenous hands and indigenous peoples as a part of the great nation, which of course, it made sense in that moment, but it’s basically the way they’ve been folklorized, all these groups. Once I solved that, I started to work with other migrant groups in Mexico City, and I had the privilege to work with the Assembly of Indigenous Migrants, the AMI. Since 2008, we’ve been collaborating, and this was the first time that I actually knew about tequio and of course practiced tequio. I went to the AMI, with the idea of making an artwork. And they said, “Oh, it’s good for you, but we don’t really need an artist. We work in tequio here.”
In that sense, they said, “If you really want to do a project with us, if you really need our help, you need to give us something back, something of your work. What can you do?” And I said, “Well, I can make drawings and I like to paint, and just finished art school.” “Okay, so you will give us a drawing workshop, and we will help you in your project. What is your project?” And I said, “I don’t really have a project,” but this kind of naiveté, this kind of approach is really important for these particular groups, because they have a lot of experience working with anthropologists, sociologists in this objectifying way, doing interviews and taking pictures. That’s why I’m an artist. I try to compose and visualize things that come from this tequio and this collective practice.
After one year working with the AMI, I proposed our first project, which is to create our own didactic material for schools. This is called Tequiografias, that looks and emulates an official one implemented by the Ministry of Education. So since 2010, exists this Tequiografias alongside the Oficial Monografias Escolares, creating another version of the things that are being taught in school.
So since 2008, I’ve been involved working particularly with organizations, consolidated groups of migrants that already have a very busy agenda.
Now, 2024, I finally got a chance to come for the first time to do a project here in the US, in the city of New York, to work with some of the families that I’ve worked with in Mexico. particularly these groups of midwives that are part of the Triqui group, these are the ones that know how to dream. These women learn midwifery in dreams. But, you know, what I realized is that the life of the migrants in Albany is these people don’t have time to dream. They don’t have time to sleep at all. They are working all the time, day and night. We’ve met mainly in Zoom, even though I’m in the same state, I have to go to Albany just to meet one hour and a half, and then I come back. In a way, I consider my role here as some sort of bridge between [the] sensibility of the people that I work with in Mexico and the ones here in Albany.
I want to, with my practice, I really want to unfold and to create something that can be beneficial for the group, for the families that I work with, but also for the public, for the audience, how also to make them dream, because we are losing more and more our ability to dream. I think there’s a battle going on as well about subjectivity, and we need to keep dreaming in order to find unexpected solutions to the given challenges that we have.
Ian Wallace: Yeah, and your residency here at Amant is going to sort of culminate with a dream workshop, basically, right?
Daniel Godínez Nivón: Exactly, yeah. So in this For Your Reference event, I’m designing, alongside with the Triquis in Albany, a dream workshop. But basically, this exercise that we are creating is something to also encourage the possibility of dreaming again for the Triqui. It’s basically an exercise for the Triqui. It’s a sound experience, a listening experience, listening exercise.
This exercise is mainly to remember how to dream for the group. =And in a way, and this exercise is also something that we would like to share for the group, to draw attention on the cultural diversity that exists in New York, the Triqui group that lives here in the state, Upstate New York, and yeah, to involve people in these collective dreaming processes.
Ian Wallace: I think what’s particularly interesting to me about the way that you use dreaming in your work is that it’s always about this sort of collective dreaming experience, or dreaming as a way to access a collective unconscious, which is really interesting, because from the sort of Western Euro-American perspective, you think about dreams, and dream analysis, and it’s a way of getting into the individual’s subconscious. But that’s very different from the way that you’re using it and the way that these communities are using it, which is it’s a collective experience. I’m thinking specifically of your project in 2017, Oneiric Propaedeutic (Propedéutico Onírico), which involved working with a dozen teenage girls in Mexico City, right? And as I understand, meeting weekly or trying to dream at the same time, basically, once a week in this sort of ongoing process.
Daniel Godínez Nivón: Yes, definitely, the Propedéutico Onírico is a cornerstone in my practice.During two years, we tried to meet in a dream every Wednesday night at 3:00 AM. And of course, when you propose this with a group of 12 teenage girls, half of them are so amazed and they really want to try it. The other half are like, “Really, come on, why are you lying to us? It’s not going to happen.” To be amazed by the possibility of dreams, many amazing things happened. After six months of trying to meet in dreams, we actually never met in a dream.
We had some hints, like someone heard some boys, someone saw someone from the back. But it was after six months that some plant forms began to appear in our dreams. First, it was a scent of chamomile. Another girl dreamed she had this fern growing up in the top of her head, and another one was in a palm tree. And I said, “Look, maybe we’re not meeting in a dream, but plants are making an appearance.” And they said, “Yes.”
We started to make representations of these plants, drawings, we started to make also clay models. That project ended as we made a garden with ashes from our volcano that we have in Mexico, Popocatépetl, and volcanic clay. And we made representations of these plants and we put it in another volcano that is called Iztaccihuatl, that can be translated as “the sleeping woman”. So it’s there, because of the material, it can last around 5,000 years.
There are some things that are way more important than the context of an exhibition only for these two or three months. Of course, we made a film that can be in exhibitions, but the mainobjects and the whole experience, it has a specific purpose. Those are the things that also I learned that from this particular project. That’s something that I’m really trying to involve in other processes even today. There are things that are more important than specifically the exhibition context and the usual ways of distributing work.
And just to close this narrative, after Oneiric Propaedeutic, I had a bunch of drawings of dream plants, some of them really interesting, because I didn’t knew if these plants existed. So one good day, I took them to the botanists and scientists of the UNAM, the university in Mexico. And I said, “Look, we have all these plants that came from dreams, but we don’t know if they exist. Perhaps, in your expertise, can tell us if these plants exist?” And they look at all these drawings and they said, “We don’t know these plants, we should study them.” So that’s how the second part of this project or another project start to unfold. So it’s also really important how from one specific project, the things that can unfold, like these plants, also can be shared with other group. And it keeps growing, in a way. It’s also because it’s hard for me also to let go, I think, for some of the people that I work with. So I just keep pushing and pushing, because that’s the thing with collective imagination: It doesn’t end.
But yeah, the Essay on Oneiric Flora is something that we are still developing, and it’s just like how slowly researching the wind in dream, that’s how I got in the Netherlands, researching the wind from dreams. And that’s how I started working with the dreams of birds, and learning that birds have dreams, deep dreams, REM dreams, and they sing in their dreams. And just like humans, we also practice language when we are really young in dreams. So that’s another layer of the research that I develop in the Netherlands, not working mainly in tequio and assemblies with humans, but also trying to imagine the dreams of animals.
Ian Wallace: So what do you dream about, and have your dreams changed since you’ve been here?
Daniel Godínez Nivón: Oh, man. Yeah, definitely. I mean, we had an earthquake, we had an eclipseꟷ
Ian Wallace: Oh yeah, what a time to be in New York.
Daniel Godínez Nivón: Totally. It’s been really intense, for sure. I’ve been having quite some nightmares, but it’s also for the midwives and the people that I work with, nightmares are the most important dreams, because they are really grounding.And so yeah, I think I’ve been pretty much aware of myself here in this city that never sleeps, of course. And yeah, some dreams are very confrontative, in the sense of thinking about where I’m rooted at, living in between the Netherlands, and Mexico, and now in New York.
I am still having meetings in dreams with other groups, and I tell my dreams also to the people, with the midwives, and we keep exchanging all these things. So my dreams are always influencing the conversations that I have. And it’s not in a very conventional way of telling your dreams. . It’s more about, what can we create from this conversation, and how this can unfold into other layers of research, and better understanding of the richness of our inner selves. So that’s why working with the midwives, who I call the experts in dreams, the ones that know how to dream, it’s truly extremely grateful to be part of this collective, of this experience.
Ian Wallace: Well, I’m looking forward to seeing how this conversation affects my dreams tonight, so I’ll report back.
Daniel Godínez Nivón: Definitely.
Daniel Godínez Nivón: Thank you, Ian, for your interest, and welcome.
Ian Wallace: Maybe we could start by having you just say a little bit about where you’re coming from, where you were before you came to Amant, and just a little bit about your background and what you do?
Daniel Godínez Nivón: Yes, of course. So my name is Daniel Godínez Nivón. I am a visual artist from Mexico, Mexico City. And this is where I come from, just before coming to New York. And well, my work is pretty grounded in the vast cultural diversity that exists in Mexico. In Mexico, we have 69 different languages, 69 different ethnic groups. And I’ve been working with four of them for the last 15 years”: Zapotecas, Mixes, Mixtecos and Triquis. And the way we work involves a very specific social tool that is called tequio, and that can be expressed as a mandatory compulsory work that you do for the common benefit. And recently, the last seven years, I’ve been working with dreams, because also, this particular group, the Triquis, they know how to dream. They use the experience of dream as a tool, as a collective exercise. So for decision-making and to solve the specific challenges, they dream. And I am also a professor in the university, and I’m a teacher, I do workshops. And for me it’s really important to how to use this sensibility and this other layer of dreams to involve other people to dream, to experience dreams, and to share them with their communities, families, partners.
Ian Wallace: With colonialism in Mexico, European colonization, that idea of tequio kind of got co-opted by the colonial project, and it was sort of repurposed. So now, instead of being about doing work for the good of the community as a whole, it became making a tribute to the European colonizer. So this is all just to say, there’s also sort of, you could say, a de-colonial aspect to that idea of engaging with that indigenous practice?
Daniel Godínez Nivón: Yeah, definitely. The story about tequio is really interesting in the so-called conquest and colonization, because indeed, it became a tributary practice. A tequio would be the working labor of indigenous hands. But the thing is that, in each one of these 69 languages, they have their own ways to express this tequio sensibility, because it’s more than a specific practice or collective work. It’s an ethical approach to the world. It’s a way to position yourself in the world. And it’s different. Each one of these groups could explain it way better than myself. For instance, for the Mixe group, it’s called Wejën Kajën. And Wejën Kajën is a concept that can be expressed as unfolding perception, an unfolding mind through learning and practice. So that’s also the way they express about education, the way they express about community work. So it’s not only the works and specific solving a problem, but it’s also a way to position yourself in the world.
Ian Wallace: Could you say a bit about how you think about your role as an artist, coming in and working with these specific communities? Because, in a way, that’s sort of a contradictory position , because you’re participating, but also always an outsider. I know that you’re working with the Triqui community in Albany, specifically. I’d love to just hear a little bit about how you arrived at this particular community that you’re collaborating with now.
Daniel Godínez Nivón: My family from my mother’s side is from a town on the Oaxaca coast that is called Juchitán. It’s mainly Zapotec, the ethnic group that lives there. And it’s also the only matriarchal society that exists in Mexico. So I come from a family of very strong women And because of the many, many challenges that exist in Mexico, of course in Latin America, a lot of racism and discrimination, young families of migrants, they really want to be separated from their own heritage in order to fit in, in order to get a job, and to have many of the reasons that people have to migrate. It’s because of the lack of possibilities and many other tensions that exists in their own communities, and in Mexico, of course.
So my grandparents didn’t teach the language to my mother and siblings, but I grew up with the stories. Since I was very young, I grew up with all these particularly scary ones, of course, good stories to scare kids in the night, all the granddaughters and the grandsons. But I was really fascinated, and I grew up feeling A lot of pride about my family and all these women in my family. I have 64 people from my family that also migrated throughout the world.
I’m mainly trying to reflect on ways this group has been represented through art and history in Mexico. And you have of course the nationalism agenda from the Moralists, and Diego Rivera, and all those guys that really want to portray indigenous hands and indigenous peoples as a part of the great nation, which of course, it made sense in that moment, but it’s basically the way they’ve been folklorized, all these groups. Once I solved that, I started to work with other migrant groups in Mexico City, and I had the privilege to work with the Assembly of Indigenous Migrants, the AMI. Since 2008, we’ve been collaborating, and this was the first time that I actually knew about tequio and of course practiced tequio. I went to the AMI, with the idea of making an artwork. And they said, “Oh, it’s good for you, but we don’t really need an artist. We work in tequio here.”
In that sense, they said, “If you really want to do a project with us, if you really need our help, you need to give us something back, something of your work. What can you do?” And I said, “Well, I can make drawings and I like to paint, and just finished art school.” “Okay, so you will give us a drawing workshop, and we will help you in your project. What is your project?” And I said, “I don’t really have a project,” but this kind of naiveté, this kind of approach is really important for these particular groups, because they have a lot of experience working with anthropologists, sociologists in this objectifying way, doing interviews and taking pictures. That’s why I’m an artist. I try to compose and visualize things that come from this tequio and this collective practice.
After one year working with the AMI, I proposed our first project, which is to create our own didactic material for schools. This is called Tequiografias, that looks and emulates an official one implemented by the Ministry of Education. So since 2010, exists this Tequiografias alongside the Oficial Monografias Escolares, creating another version of the things that are being taught in school.
So since 2008, I’ve been involved working particularly with organizations, consolidated groups of migrants that already have a very busy agenda.
Now, 2024, I finally got a chance to come for the first time to do a project here in the US, in the city of New York, to work with some of the families that I’ve worked with in Mexico. particularly these groups of midwives that are part of the Triqui group, these are the ones that know how to dream. These women learn midwifery in dreams. But, you know, what I realized is that the life of the migrants in Albany is these people don’t have time to dream. They don’t have time to sleep at all. They are working all the time, day and night. We’ve met mainly in Zoom, even though I’m in the same state, I have to go to Albany just to meet one hour and a half, and then I come back. In a way, I consider my role here as some sort of bridge between [the] sensibility of the people that I work with in Mexico and the ones here in Albany.
I want to, with my practice, I really want to unfold and to create something that can be beneficial for the group, for the families that I work with, but also for the public, for the audience, how also to make them dream, because we are losing more and more our ability to dream. I think there’s a battle going on as well about subjectivity, and we need to keep dreaming in order to find unexpected solutions to the given challenges that we have.
Ian Wallace: Yeah, and your residency here at Amant is going to sort of culminate with a dream workshop, basically, right?
Daniel Godínez Nivón: Exactly, yeah. So in this For Your Reference event, I’m designing, alongside with the Triquis in Albany, a dream workshop. But basically, this exercise that we are creating is something to also encourage the possibility of dreaming again for the Triqui. It’s basically an exercise for the Triqui. It’s a sound experience, a listening experience, listening exercise.
This exercise is mainly to remember how to dream for the group. =And in a way, and this exercise is also something that we would like to share for the group, to draw attention on the cultural diversity that exists in New York, the Triqui group that lives here in the state, Upstate New York, and yeah, to involve people in these collective dreaming processes.
Ian Wallace: I think what’s particularly interesting to me about the way that you use dreaming in your work is that it’s always about this sort of collective dreaming experience, or dreaming as a way to access a collective unconscious, which is really interesting, because from the sort of Western Euro-American perspective, you think about dreams, and dream analysis, and it’s a way of getting into the individual’s subconscious. But that’s very different from the way that you’re using it and the way that these communities are using it, which is it’s a collective experience. I’m thinking specifically of your project in 2017, Oneiric Propaedeutic (Propedéutico Onírico), which involved working with a dozen teenage girls in Mexico City, right? And as I understand, meeting weekly or trying to dream at the same time, basically, once a week in this sort of ongoing process.
Daniel Godínez Nivón: Yes, definitely, the Propedéutico Onírico is a cornerstone in my practice.During two years, we tried to meet in a dream every Wednesday night at 3:00 AM. And of course, when you propose this with a group of 12 teenage girls, half of them are so amazed and they really want to try it. The other half are like, “Really, come on, why are you lying to us? It’s not going to happen.” To be amazed by the possibility of dreams, many amazing things happened. After six months of trying to meet in dreams, we actually never met in a dream.
We had some hints, like someone heard some boys, someone saw someone from the back. But it was after six months that some plant forms began to appear in our dreams. First, it was a scent of chamomile. Another girl dreamed she had this fern growing up in the top of her head, and another one was in a palm tree. And I said, “Look, maybe we’re not meeting in a dream, but plants are making an appearance.” And they said, “Yes.”
We started to make representations of these plants, drawings, we started to make also clay models. That project ended as we made a garden with ashes from our volcano that we have in Mexico, Popocatépetl, and volcanic clay. And we made representations of these plants and we put it in another volcano that is called Iztaccihuatl, that can be translated as “the sleeping woman”. So it’s there, because of the material, it can last around 5,000 years.
There are some things that are way more important than the context of an exhibition only for these two or three months. Of course, we made a film that can be in exhibitions, but the mainobjects and the whole experience, it has a specific purpose. Those are the things that also I learned that from this particular project. That’s something that I’m really trying to involve in other processes even today. There are things that are more important than specifically the exhibition context and the usual ways of distributing work.
And just to close this narrative, after Oneiric Propaedeutic, I had a bunch of drawings of dream plants, some of them really interesting, because I didn’t knew if these plants existed. So one good day, I took them to the botanists and scientists of the UNAM, the university in Mexico. And I said, “Look, we have all these plants that came from dreams, but we don’t know if they exist. Perhaps, in your expertise, can tell us if these plants exist?” And they look at all these drawings and they said, “We don’t know these plants, we should study them.” So that’s how the second part of this project or another project start to unfold. So it’s also really important how from one specific project, the things that can unfold, like these plants, also can be shared with other group. And it keeps growing, in a way. It’s also because it’s hard for me also to let go, I think, for some of the people that I work with. So I just keep pushing and pushing, because that’s the thing with collective imagination: It doesn’t end.
But yeah, the Essay on Oneiric Flora is something that we are still developing, and it’s just like how slowly researching the wind in dream, that’s how I got in the Netherlands, researching the wind from dreams. And that’s how I started working with the dreams of birds, and learning that birds have dreams, deep dreams, REM dreams, and they sing in their dreams. And just like humans, we also practice language when we are really young in dreams. So that’s another layer of the research that I develop in the Netherlands, not working mainly in tequio and assemblies with humans, but also trying to imagine the dreams of animals.
Ian Wallace: So what do you dream about, and have your dreams changed since you’ve been here?
Daniel Godínez Nivón: Oh, man. Yeah, definitely. I mean, we had an earthquake, we had an eclipseꟷ
Ian Wallace: Oh yeah, what a time to be in New York.
Daniel Godínez Nivón: Totally. It’s been really intense, for sure. I’ve been having quite some nightmares, but it’s also for the midwives and the people that I work with, nightmares are the most important dreams, because they are really grounding.And so yeah, I think I’ve been pretty much aware of myself here in this city that never sleeps, of course. And yeah, some dreams are very confrontative, in the sense of thinking about where I’m rooted at, living in between the Netherlands, and Mexico, and now in New York.
I am still having meetings in dreams with other groups, and I tell my dreams also to the people, with the midwives, and we keep exchanging all these things. So my dreams are always influencing the conversations that I have. And it’s not in a very conventional way of telling your dreams. . It’s more about, what can we create from this conversation, and how this can unfold into other layers of research, and better understanding of the richness of our inner selves. So that’s why working with the midwives, who I call the experts in dreams, the ones that know how to dream, it’s truly extremely grateful to be part of this collective, of this experience.
Ian Wallace: Well, I’m looking forward to seeing how this conversation affects my dreams tonight, so I’ll report back.
Daniel Godínez Nivón: Definitely.