The Wounded Tree traces artist Livia Daza-Paris’s forensic method of investigation, which recognizes the more-than-human as a witness to unofficial history and state violence surrounding the enforced disappearance of her father, Iván Daza, during the Cold War in Venezuela in the late 1960s.

The exhibition proposes a criminological narrative woven under the notion of attunement  (3) understood as an investigative poetics guided by the capacity for deep listening and synchronization of human and more-than-human entities (trees, rocks, sea currents, etc.). These elements are endowed with emancipatory potential and political agency, enabling them to participate in non-legal investigations of state violence. Daza-Paris’s practice is the result of extensive research based on family archives, declassified documents from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in the USA, and fieldwork with campesinos (4) in the village of Cocorote in the state of Lara, where on January 23, 1966, her father and other communist militants belonging to the Armed Forces for National Liberation (FALN) were ambushed. Using these sources, Daza-Paris develops a counter-narrative that proposes a new interpretive framework for the official history of US interventionist policy in Venezuela and Latin America more broadly.

Seeking information that could guide her to finding answers about the whereabouts of her father’s remains, in 2015 Daza-Paris visited the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in Washington, D.C. and in Maryland. The information found in the libraries shows American diplomatic correspondence on  negotiations in the sale of military equipment to the Venezuelan government during the presidential term of Raúl Leoni just a few months before her father’s disappearance. In The Witness at the Boundary Layer (2019-23), the symbiosis between archive and plant matter positions violence as an experience that extends beyond the human, by affecting other communities, ecosystems and forms of existence with which we coexist in the world (5). The terrestrial bryophyte (moss) intervenes in history to decentralize the limits of politics in the Anthropocene era and restore memory through the ritual of mourning. In the video-performance Testimony V: Moss Burial (2019-23), Daza-Paris buries in the forest the last image of her father, presumably taken by the Venezuelan armed forces, which she received from a journalist friend while at an artist residency in Banff in spring 2019.

For Daza-Paris, the recently declassified archives also corroborate the direct experience and testimony of the Cocorote
campesinos, as well as the extent of American covert interventions in the region marked by the presence of the Military School of the Americas based in Panama since the 1940s. Awakening from a premonitory dream - an attunement, in her own words - she travels to Venezuela in 2012 to meet the campesinos, including Solano Fonseca, who helps her reconstruct the ambush and the place where it possibly took place. Farewells (for a return...) (2012-22) is a walk that traces the juxtaposition of archival and ethnographic narratives, highlighting the crisis of the referential values of history in the context of forms of interpretation and collective knowledge of the territory. The scars left by the bullets that struck the forest trees, ceiba pentandra  (6), materialize the narratives shared by the campesinos and the semiotic possibilities of nature.

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Having lost her father at the age of one, and in the absence of images with him, Daza-Paris creates My family album (2020-23)