No one bears witness for the witness
Los tiempos de nuestra lengua
ABOUT THE PROJECT
THE TIMES OF OUR LANGUAGE.
NO ONE BEARS WITNESS FOR THE WITNESS
A SITE FOR THE EMBODIED MEMORY OF THE NGIBA LANGUAGE
The website is a community-based and artistic digital repository that gathers six years of work and research around the “Western Ngiba” language. It is a collective, intimate, and rigorous effort led by artist Ulises Matamoros Ascención, in collaboration with his own community: the Ngiba neighborhoods of San António Tierra Colorada and San António Tierra Negra, in Santa Inés Ahuatempan (Puebla, Mexico).
This work began in 2018, when the artist, with the support of his Ngiba community, founded Chasen Thajni: a community space built in the central square of Ahuatempan. As a political gesture, Chasen Thajni reclaimed this place to hold community gatherings centered on Ngiba language and culture. The audio from these meetings and assemblies was transmitted in real time over 250 km away to a loudspeaker installed at the Carrillo Gil Art Museum in Mexico City, and later at the Museum of the City of Querétaro.
From those gatherings emerged various collaborative projects which, beyond being lived, emotional, and embodied experiences, left behind numerous materials. These materials, gathered here, form a repository that is shared with trust, affection, and hope: as a gift, a donation marked by absences and imperfections, but also by the promise that other worlds are possible.
In this spirit, the repository The Times of Our Language. No One Bears Witness for the Witness seeks to socialize, develop, and continue the experiences that have emerged around Chasen Thajni. It is intended to safeguard memory and encourage dissemination, but also collaboration —a fundamental part of nourishing and expanding the site. This is a project in constant growth and in ongoing search for alliances—not only within the Ahuatempan community, but also with other people and communities—distant or different—who share a reflective, critical, honest, and intense inquiry into memory, lived experience, and the awareness of the impossibility of full representation when translating across linguistic margins.
More than a digital platform, this is a constellation of materials that resist oblivion and celebrate the power of the Ngiba language, listening, and writing. This expanding archive does not aim to represent the community, but to make space for its ways of speaking, remembering, and orienting. Because no one bears witness for the witness, but we can create the conditions for the voice and its echoes to find many places to emerge, connect, and enter into dialogue.
This project is not just a linguistic record; it is a bridge between worlds. It is a guide that seeks to reveal the intellectual richness of living within different linguistic margins. Moreover, it is an act of sharing with others a language at risk, one that needs to be preserved…
Our most sincere gratitude to the Gwaertler Stiftung, whose generous funding—through the 2025 Gwaertler Grant—made the creation and realization of this website possible.
We are also deeply thankful to Chasen Thajni, which was—and continues to be—the inexhaustible center that keeps us united: a space of encounter, memory, and collective action, from which the questions and affections sustaining this project continue to emerge.
NOTE:
The Times of Our Language is a project in constant evolution, conceived as a long-term process that unfolds in phases. These phases should not be understood as linear or closed stages, but as a constellation of efforts, intuitions, and discoveries that interweave. Each phase opens new paths of exploration and deepening around the Ngiba language, its living memory, and its contemporary resonances.
Some of the materials gathered here have restricted access. This is not due to an exclusionary logic, but to a commitment to protect the integrity of the content, as well as to respect copyright, community agreements, and the cultural context from which these materials originate.
If you wish to access any of these materials, feel free to contact us. We will be glad to consider your request and, if appropriate, grant access.
We recommend visiting the Copyright section of our website, where you’ll find more information on the use, citation, and protection of the shared materials.
CONTENT, STRUCTURE, AND EXPANSION OF OUR REPOSITORY
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1. ESSENTIALS. NO ONE BEARS WITNESS FOR THE WITNESS
The vital core of this website is this space dedicated to essential words. In its first installment, this glossary compiles terms written in Ngiba, Spanish, and English, accompanied by contextual testimonies and audio recordings in the voices of Ngiba speakers.
Each word has been carefully selected for its ability to reveal profound aspects of life, spirituality, nature, and existence. This glossary, constantly growing, is a way to share not only meanings but also the living memory of those who still name the world in our language.
More than a linguistic archive, this collection is a constellation of words that seeks to highlight the intellectual richness involved in living on different linguistic margins. It explores the nature of testimony, understood not as a simple confirmation of truth, but as a tense confrontation with other realities, other languages, and other ways of feeling.
The typefaces used on this site are original designs, created from various alphabets handmade by community members, including the artist Ulises Matamoros Ascención himself. These typefaces not only serve an aesthetic function but embody a political gesture of visual recovery and reappropriation of our language. They are living signs emerging from communal strokes, inscribing Ngiba into contemporary graphics from an expressive autonomy.
Writing the words in Ngiba is also the implementation of a collectively systematized writing proposal. This exercise, born of dialogue, listening, and agreement, has profound pedagogical value: it invites new generations to read, write, and think in their language through forms that are their own, reconfiguring their relationship with language and the world. Leading this proposal are Gonzalo Valencia Durango, Ulises Matamoros Ascención, Natalia Colmena, and Alejandra Ascención.
2.- NGIBA FONTS
In this project, the word is not only heard or translated: it is also drawn. The typefaces accompanying each term in the Ngiba language and their respective translations have been conceived as visual extensions of testimony.
The Ngiba typeface was created based on a handwritten alphabet by Alejandra Ascención Colmena, the artist’s mother and a Ngiba speaker. Her stroke—precise, careful, full of pauses—not only graphically represents the language but embodies the memory and transmission that occur across generations. This font does not seek uniformity or typographic perfection: its strength lies in the living gesture, in the way each letter holds the intimate history of its writer and the language that sustains it.
The Spanish typeface, designed by the artist himself, arises in dialogue with this maternal script. Far from imposing a visual translation, this font seeks to resonate with the original alphabet, maintaining its distance and respect. Each letter was conceived as a visual interpretation of the act of translating: a way to rewrite without erasing.
This section will grow over time. New typefaces will be added, emerging from collaborative processes with community members or in conversation with other languages and experiences.
Visitors to the site will be able to download these typefaces for free, as part of a commitment to share the knowledge, beauty, and resistance embodied by these graphic forms.
Here, typefaces are not mere reading tools: they are part of the testimonial fabric of the site. They make visible that every language carries a way of seeing and writing the world, and that every translation is also a negotiation between ways of inhabiting language. In this sense, each stroke, each letter, is also an act of memory—a way to keep the language alive when words begin to grow scarce in the voice.
3. A WRITING PROPOSAL
The writing system that supports each word or text in Ngiba should be understood as an exercise in autonomy, as it arises from within the Ngiba community itself. It is the result of extensive research, compilation, and dialogue conducted by Gonzalo Valencia Durango and Ulises Matamoros Ascención, in collaboration with Alejandra Ascención, Natalia Colmena, Alfonso Ascención, Catalina Sillero, Magdalena Ochoa, Porfirio Arellano, and Cristina Climaco.
This research gave rise to a writing proposal based on the adaptation of the traditional Latin alphabet, which will find its validation—and also its future modifications—in the process of socialization that it itself fosters as it is disseminated both inside and outside the community.
Beyond its technical function, this writing proposal holds deep political value: it constitutes an act of resistance against historical processes of linguistic dispossession, and an affirmation of the capacity of communities to generate their own systems of representation. It is also a gesture of cultural reappropriation, seeking to inscribe Ngiba in the present and project it toward the future, from its own collective and living logics.
4. MEETINGS (ARCHIVE)
This space is primarily dedicated to the visual archive of community meetings. It should not be understood as a collection of anthropological or ethnographic documents, but rather as a set of visual testimonies that reflect the collective events and actions driven by the community itself.
Each record is a form of memory in motion: it not only documents but also preserves and projects the gestures, voices, decisions, and bonds woven within community processes. From a sensitive perspective, these materials also embody an affective value, capturing ways of being together, listening to one another, and building through both dissent and agreement.
Its very existence holds political value, as it demonstrates a will to narrate from within, in contrast to the extractive ways indigenous peoples have historically been represented. At the same time, it contains an aesthetic dimension, since what is shown—the spatial arrangement, the bodies, the rhythms of speech—are also living expressions of a culture that thinks itself and continually reinvents itself.
5.-FOLIOS (ARCHIVO GONZALO VALENCIA / ULISES MATAMOROS)
This archive brings together more than a thousand pages of notes, writings, drawings, and reflections centered on the experiential and empirical approach to the phonetic and linguistic structure of the Ngiba language. More than a linguistic exercise, it is the result of numerous moments marked by complicity, dedication, struggle, and mutual support between two members of the Ngiba community.
That companionship was abruptly interrupted by the sudden passing of Professor Gonzalo Valencia Durango.
This archive, which continues to grow thanks to the work of Ulises Matamoros Ascención, is both a tribute and a testimony to the ever-critical and selfless commitment that Professor Gonzalo Valencia upheld toward the community, Ngiba culture, and its language.
In Memory of Gonzalo Valencia Durango
This archive was born and continues to grow thanks to the generosity, dedication, and thought of Professor Gonzalo Valencia Durango, who devoted his life to the committed accompaniment of his community, the revitalization of the Ngiba language, and the construction of knowledge from within.
Gonzalo was not only an educator: he was a community thinker, a guardian of the word, a sensitive interlocutor who knew how to listen and engage in dialogue without imposing. His work alongside Ulises Matamoros Ascención was not only a linguistic effort but a shared praxis of resistance, tenderness, and dignity.
The sudden passing of Professor Gonzalo left a profound absence, but also a luminous guide. His memory lives on in every stroke, in every written word, in every attempt to name the world from our language. This archive belongs to him as much as it does to those who consult it, for it was woven with his voice, his time, and his affection.
6. ASSEMBLED NOTEBOOKS
These are various notebooks to be understood as “artist’s books.” These notebooks gather six years of work, notes, sketches, and drawings that the artist Ulises Matamoros Ascención has compiled around his mother tongue, Ngiba.
More than simple notebooks, these volumes constitute an intimate and artistic archive, where stroke and word intertwine to account for a process of discovery, reflection, and memory. They bear witness to a creative practice unfolding from lived experience and the ongoing quest to understand and name the world through the Ngiba language.
In their documentary dimension, these pages reveal the ongoing dialogue between the artist and his community, as well as the tension and richness involved in preserving an indigenous language in contemporary contexts. At the same time, in their artistic dimension, they are presented as unique objects where material support and content merge to build a visual and sonic narrative of cultural resistance.
7. TESTIMONIES
This series compiles various testimonies from Ngiba people of the neighborhoods San Antonio Tierra Colorada and San Antonio Tierra Negra, in the municipality of Santa Inés Ahuatempan (Puebla, Mexico). These narratives seek to break the historical silence in which the Ngiba nation has remained—and still remains—and at the same time, they attempt to overcome the enunciative impossibility that marks the experience of speaking from a marginalized language and world.
The collection “Testimonies: The Times of Our Language” is organized under the following categories:
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Essentials
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Loss
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The Silence of the Land
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The Stones Speak
These compilations are the fruit of deep research and ongoing dialogue between the artist Ulises Matamoros Ascención and the Ngiba speakers of Santa Inés Ahuatempan.
More than mere stories, these testimonies are acts of cultural and political resistance. They are the living voice of a community reclaiming its right to name its history, territory, and memory on its own terms. Through them, a web of meanings is woven that makes visible experiences of loss, mourning, hope, and reconstruction.
In a context marked by exclusion and oblivion, these testimonies are also an invitation to listen with respect and humility, to recognize the multiple ways of inhabiting the world, and to value linguistic and cultural diversity as a living heritage.
8.-SÓNICA
This space gathers sound recordings of the Ngiba language, soundscapes, and artistic experiments with sound.
More than an audio archive, Sónica invites immersion into the acoustic and expressive richness of the community, exploring the voices, environments, and resonances that shape the sensory and cultural Ngiba experience.
Through these sounds, the goal is to preserve and disseminate the living memory of the language, as well as to open new pathways for sound creation that engages in dialogue with the roots and present of this community.
LEGAL NOTICE ON COPYRIGHT AND INDIGENOUS COLLECTIVE RIGHTS
This archive is part of an indigenous Ngiba community project and is protected both by copyright and by the collective rights recognized for indigenous peoples under national and international legal instruments.
The content of this work, including the selection of essential words, testimonies, translations, and linguistic materials—including the writing system—was compiled by Ulises Matamoros Ascención in dialogue and collaboration with members of the Ngiba community of Santa Inés Ahuatempan. Its reproduction, distribution, modification, or use outside of educational, research, or non-profit artistic creation contexts requires the free, prior, and informed consent of the community.
The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (Articles 11 and 31) recognizes the right of indigenous peoples to maintain, control, protect, and develop their cultural heritage, traditional knowledge, and traditional cultural expressions, as well as collective intellectual property rights over these. Likewise, the ILO Convention 169, ratified by the Mexican State, supports the protection of the ways of life, knowledge, and cultural expressions of indigenous peoples.
Any commercial use, misappropriation, reproduction without attribution, or decontextualization of the content of this work will be considered a violation of the collective and cultural rights of our community. We reserve the right to take necessary actions to defend our cultural and linguistic heritage.
Use of this material is authorized only for educational, research, or non-profit artistic creation purposes, provided that the source is properly cited and the cultural and community context from which it originates is respected.
Some materials are protected by access keys; however, you may contact us to obtain access credentials.
Each section includes a detailed description regarding copyright, as well as citation examples in various formats. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to write to us.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I deeply thank, first and foremost, our brothers and sisters of the Ngiba nation; our fellow community members of Santa Inés Ahuatempan, for their strength, memory, and unwavering support.
I extend special gratitude to my mother, as well as to the Ascención, Colmena, Reyes, Montes, Matamoros, and Valencia Durango families, and to Professor Gonzalo Valencia Durango, for their generosity, trust, and unconditional support.
My sincerest thanks to Gwaertler Stiftung, whose valuable funding through the Gwaertler Grant 2025 made the creation and realization of this website possible. Thank you for trusting this project and allowing it to take shape from its roots.
IN MEMORIAM
This website is lovingly and respectfully dedicated to the memory of José Trinidad Ascención Colmena and Natalia Colmena Reyes, my grandparents and Ngiba adoptive parents, whose generous lives taught me the value of care, listening, and belonging. Also, to the memory of Professor Gonzalo Valencia Durango, a cherished collaborator in the work for the Ngiba language, whose premature passing left a profound mark on this shared journey. His enthusiasm, rigor, and joy continue to guide this project.