Given the scarcity of evidence to the state crimes of the 1960s and 1970s in Venezuela, a persistent phenomenon of “historical amnesia” (Galeano 1992) defines much of the social imaginary up to this day in the country. With a lack of publicly available official documents on these transgressions as the National Archives continue to be closed to public access particularly on information about this period, many Venezuelans have not grasped these actions of state violence against as highly organized crimes against humanity. The silence around this fact, coinciding with decades of increased affluence from oil extractions and a glittering showcase of infrastructural progress, made the situation for those who experienced political persecution in Venezuela during the 1960s, 70s and into the 80s, particularly marginal and other-worldly.
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abstract
This exposition considers how investigative poetic practices could broaden notions of ‘forensis’ in terms of contemporary art. By developing my concept of ‘poetic forensics’ with attunement as a method that is “palpable and sensory, yet imaginary and uncontained” (Stewart 2011) it admits the nonhuman—trees, rocks, streams, animals—suggesting new relations beyond the human as possible witnesses (Williams 2018). This presents an invitation to think differently about articulations of public truth. The question ‘Who else is witness?' emerges while exploring material intrinsically elusive to testimony on what and who has been disappeared by oppressive geopolitics. Human-rights issues are implicit given the project’s focus on historical erasure and state violence at “the threshold of detectability” (Weizman 2017). It also attends to my family’s experiences as we faced the “political disappearance” of my father Iván Daza, in 1960s Cold War-era Venezuela. The project grapples with validity through methods and lively approaches that decolonize both knowledge (Tuhiwai Smith 1999) and nature (Demos 2016) presenting posthuman challenges to a privileged human onto-epistemological position (Viveiros de Castro 2015).
- Livia Daza-Paris - (Not so) Casual Conversations: Experiments in Attunement as Method in Investigative Art Practice - 2019
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