The Books of Waiting. Book Three: What was at the Mountain?
Selected performative actions Québec, Canada 2010 - 2012
The actions in Book Three took place in the Laurentian region of Québec, Canada. They were prompted by my impressions of the ambush event told by my mother explaining my father's absence to me when I was four years old.
I approached the work from the mimetic imagination as a method: a mind-emotion activity that viscerally engages the body and the senses to access and make meaning of memories beyond cognitive language. The performativities engaged the mimetic imagination from visceral memories.
The Ambush | La Emboscada 2011
Canada, Québec 00:59Performative action: Livia Daza-ParisCamera: Livia Daza-Paris, Philip WarrickEditor: Hani MoustafaThe Thing in the Forest 2012
Canada, Québec 2012 03:27Performative action: Livia Daza-ParisCamera: Livia Daza-Paris, Philip WarrickEditor: Sebastián ReyesOn Antigone Steps' | Sobre los pasos de Antígona 2012
Canada, Québec 02:48Performative action, voice, text: Livia Daza-ParisCamera: Phil WarrickEditor: Michael PoetschkoI explored movement improvisations based on visceral memories. I recorded them through video and noticed a narrative emerging. And so, The Books of Waiting came to be. Within these books, my movements and poems became interspersed with the unsent letters from my mother to me —which I found after her sudden death in 1999—on the inapprehensible reality of my father's political disappearance during 1960s Cold War-era Venezuela.
The work is committed to expressing dimensions
from deep within the body, intangible dimensions of state violence's injuries. As an artist with a background in dance, I attempt to do so through improvisation and performance techniques.
These movement experimentations ensued in non-controlled spaces and semi-desolated areas in Toronto, ON; Laurentides, QC; and Detroit, MI. There were no second takes, neither special lighting nor props.