I grew up in Venezuela during a period where state-organized violence impacted directly on my family, causing vivid loss and horror. Because of my family’s active and continued participation in left-wing politics, it was necessary for us to maintain a low profile; speaking openly about my father was not an option. For much of my life, there was uncertainty about whether he, my father, had been politically disappeared or, perhaps secretly somewhere, alive.
The images below are a collection of newspaper clippings and related documents, some from primary sources. In the first compilation, the image from left to right, there is a photo of my father Iván Daza (in the black suit) with his brothers, at the Universidad Central de Venezuela (circa 1965).
In Testimony X-3 (2018), my own physical and emotional state is transferred through the physical instability of the images recorded at the pounding rhythm of my steps. The overexposure and the erratic framing further contribute to accentuate the disorienting atmosphere of this encounter as the nature of truth is obliquely suspected. This is a concern that I attempt to present through the work’s aesthetics, which resonates with Kurosawa's Rashômon(1950). I recorded in such a way that disruptions and blurs come to reference memory gaps analogous to the uncertain qualities of testimony (Weizman 2017). These insights on the recorded event are highlighted with the editing, weaving what is already there but also revealing evidence of an emotional disturbance that something else might have been going on in the story...with complicated layers of political information.
Washington Tourist Map 1960s. This map is here as a visual reference to the period being researched.
