An artistic practice from a ‘plurality of ways of knowing’ surrounding political disappearance
We are delighted to share the final peer reviewed articles from a trio of work by Livia Daza-Paris’ PhD.
Abstract:
This paper explores how my practice of attunement responds to the critical problem of ‘political disappearance’ (Amnesty International 1993: 1), which is in close proximity to my own experience. This practice includes improvisational and experimental movement, grounded in
a plurality of ways of knowing – admitting Indigenous knowledge – where multiple worlds frame the onto-epistemological. The question Who else is witness? emerges through experiential and intuitive performativities and situated practices of attunement to the notion of presence in absence. The attunement experiments that follow are meant to give a hint of the unexpected non-human as witness that becomes revelatory and is lively in my work. I suggest that these artistic investigations impart a sense of the dynamic forces, both dissipative and generative, that circulate in the blurred territories between presence and absence, fact and memory, human and non-human; perhaps they also stand as poetic resistance to historical ‘amnesia’ (Galeano 1992: 262) in contemporary Venezuela about Cold War-era state violence.
