The Witness at the Boundary Layer 2019
Site-specific intervention at Buffalo Mountain. Banff Center for the Arts, Canada Recently declassified CIA documents on US meddling in 1960s VenezuelaHand-made caffenol developed and printed 35mm photography film in photographic paper, fallen tree trunkLivia Daza Paris is a Venezuelan-Canadian interdisciplinary artist and researcher. In her work, the personal and the political are always entangled. Her interest in attunement as an investigative method originates at the intersection of her background in somatic dance and her family history of political disappearance during Cold War-era Venezuela. Her ‘attunement investigations’ speculate on beyond-the-human testimony that includes the more-than-human (nature) as witness to nonofficial history and state violence.
Early movement studies in the late 1980s with Joan Skinner, inspired Livia to become certified in Joan's radical pedagogy of Skinner Releasing Technique (SRT). Livia's current art practice with attunement as method is deeply informed by SRT's pioneering emphasis on kinetic awareness immersed in poetic imagery and relationality of self and the natural world.
Additionally, Livia approaches art-making from a decolonial perspective by drawing from Indigenous ways of knowing. Her work proposes to participate in the "politics of testimony", expanding notions of testimony and evidence beyond the logic of singularity, dominant in conventional international legal frameworks.
Poetic Forensics is what she has come to call this practice.“Poetic” comes from the Greek “poiesis”, to bring into being what was not there before, while “forensics” is from the Latin "forensis", to speak notions of truth in a public forum. With Poetic Forensics, she contests official histories of forced disappearances—including that of her own father—by revealing seemingly tenuous evidence and testimony beyond-the-human, in a Latin-American context of systemic colonial violence and US interventionism.
Contact:poetic.forensics@protonmail.comlivia.paris@pm.me
Early movement studies in the late 1980s with Joan Skinner, inspired Livia to become certified in Joan's radical pedagogy of Skinner Releasing Technique (SRT). Livia's current art practice with attunement as method is deeply informed by SRT's pioneering emphasis on kinetic awareness immersed in poetic imagery and relationality of self and the natural world.
Additionally, Livia approaches art-making from a decolonial perspective by drawing from Indigenous ways of knowing. Her work proposes to participate in the "politics of testimony", expanding notions of testimony and evidence beyond the logic of singularity, dominant in conventional international legal frameworks.
Poetic Forensics is what she has come to call this practice.“Poetic” comes from the Greek “poiesis”, to bring into being what was not there before, while “forensics” is from the Latin "forensis", to speak notions of truth in a public forum. With Poetic Forensics, she contests official histories of forced disappearances—including that of her own father—by revealing seemingly tenuous evidence and testimony beyond-the-human, in a Latin-American context of systemic colonial violence and US interventionism.
Contact:poetic.forensics@protonmail.comlivia.paris@pm.me