Antigone, diary of rituals 

Antigone, diary of rituals is a series of four durational site-specific performative interventions that I captured in video—thanks to people from the area who had never worked in video camera. These rituals metaphorically marked the land around my father's final route before he was politically disappeared in the late 1960s.

The title references Sophocles' Antigone, who defied the established power so that her dissident brother would have proper funeral rites. In a way, encouraged by Antigone's brave ethical actions, I went back to Venezuela from Canada, where I had lived for nearly 20 years. I did these metaphorical burial rites for my father Iván Daza, even though his remains continue to be disappeared., even though his remains continue to be disappeared. 

These works echo the feminist premise that “the personal is political.”  Indeed, from an autoethnographic perspective, the work expands into complex geopolitics and human rights. 

Moving away from victimization perspectives, it delves instead into notions of self-determination. These videos document my quest through non-official history, memory, and land. From this project onward, my approach to art-making shifted into what I call Ecologies Ecologies of Poetic Forensics taking my practice into a complex web of investigative art-led research. 

Many thanks to editors Alba Daza, Michael Poetschko and Xi Feng. Many thanks to Michael Bowdidge and Jean Marie Casbarian for their thoughtful advice. Special thanks to Roraima Ramos, production coordinator, for the exhibition at the MAC Caracas. Finally, my gratitude to the artists and friends who generously attended to my request for 'Instructions to find my disappeared father'. This work is the result of merging my interpretation with their guiding instructions.