Women Cinemakers meets
Livia Daza-Paris Lives and works both in Caracas, Venezuela and Montreal, Canada ‘At the Wall’ considers complicated grief, political displacement and it belongs to a series of investigative artworks that include the witness borne by the more-than-human. It proposes my concept of poetic forensics —especially in relation to the threshold of detectability (Weizman, 2017), a notion that concerns cases where state violence has occurred but has been made invisible. As geopolitical interventions and human rights abuses in Venezuela during Cold War era remain absent from public discourse, my work uses haptic spatiality and attunement processes to create documentary experiments aiming to capture evidence (albeit tenues) and suggest a poetic testimony.
process that is investigative, interdisciplinary and rigorous. I am thrilled about being
An interview by Francis L. Quettier
able to engage in such depth in terms of ideas and practice with the themes that
and Dora S. Tennant
interest me. But please bear with me, as I am still tentatively navigating how to
womencinemaker@berlin.com
articulate some of my theoretical framework, thought processes and artistic contributions.
Hello Livia and welcome to
: we would like to introduce you
to our readers with a couple of questions regarding your background. You have a
In terms of how my artistic research has come to be, thank you for your incisive
solid formal training and you hold postgraduate degrees in Community Economic
observation about the role of the Skinner Releasing Technique (SRT) and the
Development and Digital Technologies in Design Arts both from Concordia
aesthetics of Grotowski's theatre as foundations for the deeper artistic motivations
University, Canada and an MFA in Creative Practice from Transart Institute
in my work. Your question is a provocation for me to think harder about the origins
accredited by Plymouth University, UK: how did these experiences influence your
of what I am doing now. In many ways, how I am working already involves such an
evolution as an artist? Moreover, how does your
embedded and highly personal practice that it is hard at first to pick the points of
due to Skinner Releasing Technique and the aesthetics of Grotowski’s
entry in terms of how these influences converged with the main question of my artistic research, which is: How to “evidence” something or someone that has been
theatre direct your artistic research?
made to disappear by political oppression when the traces of such evidence are Thank you for inviting me to be part of your biennial publication. I am excited about
almost nonexistent? Could we take a non-anthropocentric turn beyond our
your interest in this particular video work
human-centric culture and ask: Who else (or what else) can be a witness? These
:
, mostly because it
might lead our conversation through a web of diverse ideas and themes that make up
questions are central to my research, and both SRT and the Grotowski techniques
the various layers of my artistic work in general.
help me trace answers to them through artistic means. I hope to be able to devote
Yes, after my formal training and a career in movement and dance, I began academic studies, mostly because I was interested in giving a critical context to my ongoing
some time later in this interview to how the video “At the Wall” addresses and, somehow demonstrates, how these very questions are addressed in the practice.
practice but also because I wanted to expand my artistic work beyond the areas of my
I would like to briefly introduce SRT. I met Joan Skinner, its creator, when I lived in
original training in dance and movement. In fact, I am currently pursuing an arts-led
NYC back in the late eighties, when there was an amazing exploration and practice
research PhD, through which I can take my core interests and develop them, within a
of alternative movement techniques other than the ones known from the more