(NOT SO) CASUAL CONVERSATIONS

The exposition “(Not so) Casual Conversations: Experiments in Attunement as Method in Investigative Art Practice” 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).