Assemblies of Solidarity in Simultaneous Acts

Livia Daza-Paris

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Prologue

In June 2012, Sr Solano, an elder campesino[1] in the community of Cocorote, Lara State, Venezuela, told me that my father’s remains might lie beneath a stand of pine trees visible from his home. Speaking for the community, he asked me to return to search the land for my father’s remains and those of others politically disappeared[2] by the state in the 1960s. But I have not yet been able to return. In June 2022, ten years later, this project evolved in collaboration with Sr Solano, the campesinos, my brother, and me. Unable to search together for the disappeared, we organized these ‘simultaneous acts’ to overcome our geographical distance. From my home in Canada, I turned to the forests of Outaouais, Quebec, while in Cocorote, they sought signs in the pines. We gathered trunks from dying trees, placed my mother's letters about my father's disappearance inside them, and then journeyed by land to the Atlantic shores of each country. There we offered the trunks into the waters, letting them drift toward each other across the ocean. These acts are more than metaphorical burials. They are gestures of resistance, suggesting connection among the trees, the disappeared, the human participants, and the ocean’s currents—as life reclaiming life within a vast web of relationality.

Figure 1: Key locations and North–South Atlantic currents. In Venezuela, the route followed the Tocuyo River from Cocorote to the Boca de Tocuyo estuary,[3] opening to the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic. In Canada, it ranged from Algonquin Anishinaabe territory in Outaouais, Quebec, to the Kouchibouguac estuary in Mi’kmaq territory, in New Brunswick, which also opens to the Atlantic.[4]

Introduction

These simultaneous acts, enacted as ‘assemblies of solidarity’ (Butler) with the campesinos, emerged from spontaneous gatherings in 2012, when we marked the site where my father fell to anti-insurgency special military forces and was subsequently disappeared.[5] This project stems from 1960s state violence and its lasting impact—both on me as the daughter of the disappeared, and on the campesinos and their territory, where they witnessed these events and experienced state persecution, an unacknowledged chapter in Venezuelan history. My video En la Montaña[6] documents the participatory (Fals Borda)[7] and performative (Muñoz) action from 2012—our initial collaborative investigation of the politically disappeared. Since that experience, we have cultivated years of ongoing collaborations and relationships, leading to this project. The text that follows aims to unfold the simultaneous acts in Venezuela and Canada while weaving in theoretical and methodological groundings. I use performing patterns of ‘storying’ as method (Phillips and Bunda), which are non-linear, poetic, and open-ended. Footnotes serve as integral meta-conversations within the overall narrative, adding supplementary information and autobiographical notes.

Through this project, I ask: is communication possible between the politically disappeared, their people, and the land? If communication emerges through kinesthetic attunements—reframed by Indigenous discourses on kinship (Todd; Kimmerer ‘Speaking of Nature’)—could human and more-than-human beings come together in performative assemblies of solidarity (Butler)? If so, the assemblies that constitute this project function as simultaneous gatherings that span place and time, employing embodied poetic practices to reveal non-official history while tending to our lived experiences of human rights abuses that occurred during the nominal democracies of Cold War-era Venezuela in the 1960s under presidents Betancourt and Leoni (1959-1969) (Abreu 20).

With these multiple meanings in mind, my practice finds good company in the work of artists engaged in collaborative, durational ecological art and time-based intervention performances that comment on state abuse, particularly in Latin America since the 1950s. The assemblies enact what I call an ‘ecology of poetic forensics’, contesting a legacy of US-backed state violence in Venezuela (Abreu; Oliveros Espinoza); I propose they engage in the ‘emancipatory potential of hope’ articulated by Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch (Utopian Function of Art and Literature 41). We, the participants, gather to counter the erasure of non-official history. Thus, we enact anticipatory potentials—self-affirming acts in the present and, in a sense, glimpses of Bloch’s ‘not-yet’ utopia.[8] These assemblies can thus be understood in conversation with the works of Guatemalan performance artist Regina José Galindo, mainly her piece Tierra;[9] Colombian multimedia artist Carolina Caycedo, with her ongoing project Be Dammed;[10] and Colombian/British artist-researcher Luis Carlos Sotelo, particularly his practice-based research project Hacer Memoria al Andar (Making Memory While Walking).[11]

As part of my practice-based doctoral research, this project contends that the more-than-human should not be reduced to an inanimate ‘thing’ or ‘artifact’. While these notions commonly circulate within theories of natural-cultural worlds (Schuppli), the more-than-human, from an Indigenous knowledge framework, are regarded as sentient beings, with agency and as kin (Demos ‘Rights of Nature’; Sarayaku Kichwa Peoples; Todd; Ruiz-Serna).[12] Through kinesthetic attunement, my research explores processes of 'thinking-feeling' (Escobar) between humans and more-than-human beings in relation to the disappeared. Through this approach, the project is performative, participatory, and investigative. We, the participants, still trust that in future gatherings, we might be able to be together—in each other's physical presence—and carry out our most crucial performative act: to move through the land in Lara State, Venezuela, in search for the remains of the disappeared.

Returning to storying as method—which allows me to weave together multiple temporalities and perspectives—I was inspired by a phrase from historian Bathsheba Demuth, who observes that ‘knowing causes is not the same as making sense’. She reflects:

The earth is ceasing to cohere: how to make that coherent? The way I know to do this is with the pattern of a story. But what we see on the river has no end. We are telling from a middle or a beginning, with no view of where it will resolve. (Demuth, ‘Living in the Bones’)

Following Demuth, I too seek to bring coherence to the research process. My narrative engages with themes that span territories, temporalities, and both human and more-than-human issues of justice. I find it helpful to think in terms of ‘ecology-as-intrasectionality’, a concept introduced by art historian T. J. Demos to acknowledge the inseparable relationality between ecology and systemic frameworks of injustice—and particularly relevant within the colonial pan-American context that frames this work. Building on this, my investigation of political disappearances in 1960s rural Venezuela aims not only to understand and expose the circumstances as fact but to go further: it seeks to ‘make sense’ of such violence through the emancipatory poetic activity of these simultaneous acts, with their myriad synchronicities and attunements between human and more-than-human.

I organized this project into three main acts: Act 1: Gathering Tree Trunks; Act 2: Letters and Tree Trunk Ceremony; and Act 3: Ocean Offering.[13] Within this article’s scope, I focus on Act 1, describing my activities while providing the context motivating this work—aiming to convey how practice precedes theory. The videos of Acts 1 and 2 were created as image dialogues, documenting our efforts to gather beyond borders. In editing, I utilized double screens with varying sizes to convey a meta-conversation on rhythms and proximity, representing real-time ground events. This visual approach draws inspiration from video artist Ursula Biemann’s Forest Law, which similarly employs multi-channel video with varying screen sizes to create meta-conversations. My videos cannot fully translate the project’s embodied experiences or the range of movements, attunements, sensing, temporalities, and awe that unfolded in these long-durational events. Yet they provide evidence of these actions taking place—crucial to the context of non-official history of political disappearance discussed—and show the various environments along with our shared participatory intent, even as we worked across distant territories.

In reflecting upon this project, I think of the poetic and political potential enacted by families, primarily women, in the high-altitude Atacama Desert of Chile. Day after day, they search for the bones of their politically disappeared loved ones, whom they lost during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship (1974–1990). The incessant search aiming to gather the bones is documented in the poetic documentary film Nostalgia de la Luz (Nostalgia for the Light) by Chilean director Patricio Guzmán. In their solitary search through the desert soil, these relatives insist on giving attentive and tender care to their dead. They engage with hope, not as a wish, but as an activity that nourishes the effort of their ongoing search. Such enacting and gathering inspires these simultaneous acts, as they are also engaged in the political potential of enacting hope.

Act 1: Gathering Tree Trunks (in Canada) 

Then the tree fell on the roof. At first I thought, ‘Is this what a falling bomb feels like? Has the roof blasted open? Has the structure been broken?’. The ground shook beneath me. ‘Will the house stand in place? What about the propane tank?’. It was midnight, with no moonlight, in the early days of autumn 2020. I was in my new home, nestled at the edge of a forest in the hills of the Outaouais region. Almost a year had passed since the move, and we had recently noticed many trees dying on the sloped land, a few meters above our home. A local arborist had assessed that we still had a couple of months before we would need to address one particularly large tree. But stepping outside, I saw that this very tree had been torn from the ground and had fallen onto our home. The storm soon passed, and even though I was shaken by the blast of the tree, my need for sleep took over.

At this point in the research, I was feeling restless. My original doctoral fieldwork proposal aimed to explore the land, searching for the remains of the disappeared as an embedded participatory practice with the campesinos in Venezuela—my country of birth and upbringing. However, this became impossible within the university context: a failed coup d’état in 2019, just a month before I submitted my risk assessment, led to a halt in the project despite its standing ethical approval. This situation lay at the root of my restlessness: the campesinos, my friends, and my family had prepared thoroughly over the years for my return to search for the politically disappeared. Unable to be on the land in Venezuela, I decided to take a detour from my research, moving from Montreal to the countryside of the Outaouais region in Quebec—a shift from city life to the land. But questions lingered: what kind of activity could ‘replace’ what is only possible to do there, in Cocorote? How could I carry forward the substance of this search here, in this faraway place?

The way forward to ‘encounter’ the disappeared remains of my father was announced by the falling of the tree behind my home.

Two other serendipitous events followed: an invitation to present an artwork at the Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal that I had created years ago (my first attempt to respond to my mother’s letters about my father’s disappearance),[14] and a message from Sr Solano asking when I would return to begin our search for the remains. These three unexpected signals—the falling tree, Sr Solano’s message, and the curatorial invitation to exhibit my earlier work with my mother’s letters—converged during the pandemic, a time marked by a devastating death toll, particularly among people of colour like myself, my father, and the campesinos. I felt a strong pull to act, especially as I remained impelled by Sr Solano’s words from ten years ago:

Perhaps the remains of your father disappeared by the anti-insurgency army in the 60s, are among the bones we believe lie buried beneath the stand of planted [foreign] pines. We want to go with you and search for the remains.[15]

The possibility of finding my father’s remains feels nearly impossible, yet the search itself becomes, in a sense, like a poem: an open-ended process that calls for waiting, pausing, and attuning, where specific answers prove elusive. While I couldn't act on Sr Solano's invitation directly, these synchronous moments opened a different path forward. More importantly, they revealed to me a kinship bound by relationality and responsibility—a foundation that, through collective acts of solidarity, gestures toward something akin to emancipatory hope.

I returned to one of the first questions of my research—could humans and more-than-humans be co-investigators in the search for the disappeared? Though time has passed since that question first emerged, it has remained vibrant all along, shaping my understanding. Moving forward, I ask: at what moment did I begin to perceive the fallen tree as if it were speaking to me of the bodies of humans not properly buried? Working through these questions, I experimented with participatory and performative approaches that enabled the creation of this work. Even if finding the remains of those disappeared by the state would be unlikely, these acts might still foster investigative encounters through kinesthetic attunements. With our gestures, we open possibilities to resist disappearance and forgetting. What can remain vibrant and alive in the face of political violence? These concerns are what unravel and motivate these simultaneous acts.

Figure 2: Sr Solano Fonseca at his home, in Cocorote, Lara State, Venezuela in 2022. Photo courtesy: Miriam Fonseca

Gathering Tree Trunks

Figures 3 and 4: Stills from video, Simultaneous Acts, Canada and Venezuela. Act 1: Gathering Tree Trunks (2023). Documenting the gathering of tree trunks from behind my home in Quebec, Canada, and from the stand of pines near Cocorote, Lara State, Venezuela—the presumed site where my disappeared father’s remains may be.

The uncanny timing of the three events mentioned above felt like a call to continue participating, alongside human and more-than-human forms of agency, in the investigation of the disappeared. How we could gather in the same place was a riddle to solve—even as the early, tragic period of the pandemic had passed, everything was uncertain. As I pursued this work on the search for the disappeared, another form of erasure was unfolding: the pandemic had unleashed a frenetic rush to build homes away from cities, leading to extensive deforestation in rural regions like the Outaouais where I live, mere metres from my home.

The relentless sound of trees falling—many of them a century old—alongside the rumble of heavy machinery removing them saturated the days for too many months. No more birdsong; withered and blighted gardens. I had an eerie sense of being immersed in a war zone that few were willing to recognize. Witnessing the trees being torn apart by heavy machinery was deeply unsettling. I learned from one of the arborists hired for the job that this approach was chosen because it was much cheaper than cutting them down individually, and their removal was also costly. After being uprooted, the trees were collected and buried entirely in the ground. Now, there’s no visible trace of this burial site—just a large mound on the ground. I considered stepping into the man-made crater—the fossa in the ground that had become a burial site for the trees. I thought about making a performative intervention within that fossa. But a bewildering fear held me back. Another thought persisted: is this how mass graves are created, with all the bodies gathered and buried in a single place?[16]

My apprehension and wariness to engage in these performative interventions stay with me, echoing my childhood experiences of political persecution. Yet something else also endures: early experiences of community and social care that instilled in me an embodied sense of kinship and aspirations for justice. As I write, I am reminded of the closing lines of a poem by Muscogee (Creek) Nation and US poet laureate Joy Harjo:  

I take myself back, fear.

You are not my shadow any longer.

I won’t hold you in my hands.

You can’t live in my eyes, my ears, my

voice

my belly, or in my heart my heart

my heart   my heart

But come here, fear

I am alive and you are so afraid

of dying. (‘I Give You Back’, in How We Became Human)[17]

The insidiousness of the forest clearing struck me as a perverse, real-life simile: an attack on life and ecology disguised as progress. This situation brought me back to what I had witnessed—silent abductions, disappearances, and state oppression operating in the shadows, beyond public knowledge. These events unfolded in nominally democratic Venezuela, even as the country became a refuge for leftist political exiles fleeing the brutal repression of Operation Condor, a campaign of terror led by South American military regimes, with US support, to suppress socialist movements across the region.[18] In a cynical ideological twist, my uncle Ramón Paris was forcibly disappeared by the Venezuelan democratic state in 1975, abducted from his home for his publicly expressed socialist political views. For 14 days, he was held in secret and subjected to torture. By a stroke of luck, he made it out alive—a close family friend with government connections learned what had happened and used their influence to secure my uncle’s release.

The Letters

There is a page with a short paragraph where my mother writes: ‘I need to have courage and tell you what happened to your father at the time of his death’. But she doesn’t do this. In the many pages of her longhand writings to me, only here does she not complete her thoughts; she leaves the page unfinished. Did her courage falter? Like her, I also do not finish reading her writings, not yet. I am apprehensive of what I might find. I found my mother’s letters over 20 years ago, after her sudden death on my birthday. Did she leave this writing as a compass for me?

Certainly, these letters are heirlooms. The handwritten form embodies something tangible about my mother herself: the physicality of the writing and her editorial practice of erasure visible in the letters let me feel her voice, hesitancy, and care. To look at these handwritten texts, shown in Figure 5, is almost to have access to her presence, to hear her voice in her written testimony. Written from an intimate place these letters unveil aspects of how the 1960s Venezuela state strategy of disappearance penetrated and destabilized the lives of those left behind, and how political terror functions to suppress ideologies that threaten the regime. As primary sources, they are multidimensional: personal narratives that carry historical, political, and social weight—dimensions that I now place before the public forum.

And so, the letters: I print them, touch them, carry them with me. I keep them by my side at my work desk. I share them with family. I transcribe them. Like pieces of a puzzle, I try to see how they fit: looking for patterns and meaning, rearranging them in search of direction. Yet still, I cannot read them completely. Instead, on Mother’s Day, I place printed copies on the earth beside the fallen tree on the hill above my home.[19] I think of the paper they are written on and wonder how long they will last before decaying: biomaterials from trees themselves returning to the soil. I reflect on the regenerative processes they embody, both in content and in their organic materiality, engaging with the more-than-human energies that stir in this land of long winters. Here, spring arrives all at once; life becomes palpable again. In the weeks leading up to our journey to the Atlantic Ocean, perhaps the letters, as they rested on the ground beside the tree trunk, engaged in conversations together beyond human parameters (Kimmerer, Gathering Moss 5), listening to each other about a story seldom told.

Figure 5: Scanned letters written by my mother, Irma Paris,1998-1999. These pages reflect her effort to address the unspoken challenges we experienced, connecting them to the political persecution and profound disorientation caused by my father’s disappearance during my infancy. Though she spoke of these letters to me, she never sent them. I found them on her nightstand after her passing in the spring of 1999.

As I placed the letters by the fallen tree, I hesitated to proceed. There’s something unsettling about creating works–writing and moving my body–while immersing myself in the issue of political disappearance. It feels deeply destabilizing and unpredictable, demanding a whole-self engagement. Through my practice-based research, I recognize that such engagement becomes possible through the skills I had previously developed from the Skinner Releasing Technique, studying with its founder Joan Skinner.[20] This provides a framework that enables me to proceed as I navigate the intensity of these explorations.

Releasing introduces me kinesthetically to the notion of conversation and listening beyond human parameters. This is reflected in its pedagogy, with abundant imagery of the natural world that guides participants into sensory attunements, integrating inner and outer awareness. This integration grounds my explorations in attunement between human and more-than-human beings, as exemplified in my ongoing project The Witness at the Boundary Layer,[21] bringing together mosses and declassified documents on covert US involvement in 1960s Venezuela. When I encountered Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Gathering Moss, an in-depth study of mosses, these ideas on attunements and listening beyond the human became much clearer. Kimmerer, a botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, reflects: ‘There’s an ancient conversation going on between mosses and rocks, poetry to be sure’ (5).

The term poiesis, from the Greek ‘to make’, refers to bringing something into being ‘that did not previously exist’ (Sönmez & Nur Bati 67). This idea resonates with my explorations, as I consider the political poiesis of attuning to what becomes and what emerges from these performative, durational acts. In this context, I draw a connection between the notion of poetic ‘making’ as referenced by Irish poet and conflict-resolution mediator Pádraig Ó Tuama’s in his reflections on gestures:

Sometimes I think a gesture is not full, or empty. It—like a poem—is a made-thing. Something small and made that continues to make: it does not change the past, but it tries to make something now. (Ó Tuama n.p.)

Inspired by this reflection, I became curious about the potential analogy between small, intentional body gestures and the form of a poem. The gestures made in this work attune to something that, in their continual unfinished making, speaks of care but also resistance. This poetic approach is rooted in the present moment and explores the emancipatory potential of these gestures to create something regenerative in response to state and geopolitical violence: they become what performance scholar José Esteban Muñoz calls ‘utopian performativity’,[22] situating these open-ended, simultaneous acts within the space of activism.

I think of the tree transforming on the ground, supporting life, nourishing life, even in death. The cycle of life, decay, and life once again is reflected in both the tree and the letters. I think, too, of the disappeared and of my father—his remains nowhere known, yet his remains somewhere giving life to new life—a premise that eclipses the victimhood imposed by state violence. All this feels odd to dwell on, but the idea of poiesis as ‘life in the making’ is comforting, and contemplating this process feels, somehow, lively and emancipatory.

A broader aim of my research is to recognize more-than-human beings as agential participants in investigative art practice, acknowledging their role in political worlds and their capacity to make justice claims. I propose that they can act as co-investigators, contributing to narratives that extend beyond official histories. This perspective informs what I term ‘ecologies of poetic forensics’, an approach that combines poiesis (creative making) with the Latin forensis— ‘public discussion’ or ‘pertaining to the forum’. Through this approach, I explore how more-than-human participants contribute to understanding political disappearances. This nuanced application of forensics aligns with Forensic Architecture's work, which reclaims the term from its modern legal and medical constraints by returning to the original, inclusive meaning of forensis: the capacity of all beings—human and more-than-human alike—to 'speak' in the public forum (Weizman 65).

While sharing this expanded conception of forensics, my approach differs from Forensic Architecture's emphasis on computational sensors, data analysis, and visualization. In contrast, my work centres on kinesthetic attunements as an investigative 'bodily political practice' (Rivera Cusicanqui and Geidel xviii). Drawing on my background in Skinner Releasing, my practice prioritizes bodily, relational approaches over technical instrumentation. This experimentation with attunements and relationality aligns methodologically with Māori Indigenous scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies, which supports embodied, relational knowledge. My project’s participatory performative practices and ‘meandering’ investigative methods thus reflect both kinesthetic sensing and a decolonizing ethos. This ethos extends to the project’s web-like relations with collaborators: the campesinos in Lara, the trees, the Atlantic Ocean, my companion dog Canto, and my younger brother, Manuel Gruber Paris. Together, we nurtured this project into being.

Trees, rivers, rocks, animals, soil, and spirits constitute what the Sarayaku Kichwa Peoples call a 'living territory' (Kawsak Sacha Declaration 1).[23] This understanding of territory as living decentres the human and aligns with my experiments. In my work, ecology is understood through Colombian anthropologist Daniel Ruiz-Serna's theoretical framework of ecological violence. As he explains, 'I call this violence ecological as it encompasses world-making relations between different kinds of sentient beings … that are endowed with some degree of personhood and conscious intent' (2). Ruiz-Serna further develops this concept by describing territories as living entities capable of perceiving violence (2). This relational understanding of ecology shapes my investigative approach, where the more-than-human—framed by Indigenous discourse—becomes both witness and co-investigator of state violence. I propose that these human and more-than-human relations participate in a 'politics of witnessing' (Derrida), grounded in notions of inhabiting the world in kinship.

The Day of Departure

The day arrived for us to set off on the road, bringing the fallen tree trunk to the Atlantic Ocean. Although summer was almost here, it has been rainy and cold. My partner, Phil, our companion dog, Canto, and I are coming on this journey. Phil will handle the logistics and driving. Of all the preparations, gathering a part of the trunk from the fallen tree lying on the ground behind my home felt most important to me. I had a few ideas about how this action would proceed; I expected something simple and direct, but it demanded something else. I felt energetically charged, intensely attuned to the act of collecting the trunk. My movements became slow, intentional, and clear, as if I were transmitting my care to the ground and the tree.

It had been nearly two years since the tree fell, yet it is alive. Trees can remain alive many years before dying, sustained by neighboring trees and interconnected root systems (Wohlleben et al.). The fallen tree, too, is one of my relations. Carrying this trunk embodies deep care within an ecology of sustenance. The physical effort required for this action felt like an observance for those who were not given a proper burial. This effort to carry the heavy trunk with gentleness is an embodied meditation on ethical questions about the rights of the dead.[24]

I wanted to document these actions, and I consider recording in various ways. One approach is haptic (Nelson), as if the camera’s lens could reach out and touch the soil, the tree trunks, and my mother’s letters, damp from many days of rain, nestled among fallen trees and the sprouting plants beginning to re-inhabit this patch of forest. Another approach treats the terrain like a stage, with entrances and exits, allowing the camera to capture what comes into view. A third perspective imagines the recording process as ‘partner studies’ in Skinner Releasing classes: one partner moves with their eyes closed, while the other follows and gently nudges their body into surprising ways of moving, suggesting new directions and always attentive to their partner’s safety (Emslie and Skinner 276).

I intended to carry the tree trunk, carving out a path with my movements along the uneven hill without disturbing either the forest or the trunk with my actions. I wanted to handle the camera while moving, but soon realized this would not be possible. Just then, Phil comes by to check on me, and I explain what I envision for the camera: to follow my movements seamlessly, simply capturing the act of gathering the tree from the ground, carrying it on my shoulders, and placing it in the car. Then, following an impulse, I lie down next to the tree and the letters on the ground. After a few minutes, I rise and attempt to lift the trunk, only to find it far heavier than I’d anticipated. I hadn’t considered that beeches are among the densest of trees, and this weight challenges me: I waver. How can I move without falling on the uneven, slippery ground across eighty meters to the car? I turn to the principle of suppleness (Emslie and Skinner 277) in Skinner Releasing, which encourages movement without compressing the body. Suppleness is a quality inherent in the soft tissues of the body, but there is also a suppleness in the soil, inviting me to let my weight circulate into the ground that supports me. This carries me forward as I suspend my body beneath the weight of the trunk. Yet the unexpected heaviness suddenly transforms in my mind into the weight of my father’s body—his body becoming many bodies.

As the rain continues to fall gently, I feel the heavy weight transform and release with my acceptance of it. And then I remember something Joan Skinner once said to me after I had a powerful emotional reaction in one of her Releasing classes:

You are releasing. This deep sadness is not madness—you are releasing. Here, walk with me and breathe. Feel your legs, your body moving, and the weight of your body pouring out into the earth from your feet.[25] 

Joan’s voice and her words are a vivid memory, guiding me as I carry the trunk with grace and determination. In this moment, I imagine—perhaps even dare to believe—that the capacity to carry my dead, mis muertos, is present here.

Before getting into the car, I reach for the white fabric set aside to cover and protect the trunk until our arrival at the ocean. Carefully, I enshrine the trunk in this fabric, dedicating myself, through this simple act, to fulfilling the purpose of the journey: to bring the trunk to the shores of Eastern Canada, to be released like a time capsule—but also as a body receiving its rites of passage—into the northern ocean currents traveling south—perhaps reaching Venezuelan shores. Or perhaps the trunk will decompose, assimilating into ocean matter and one day becoming rain. What is certain is that the trunk carries a message across time, to the future, the past, and the present:

Our disappeared, we do not forget them…

Figure 6: Video installation of Simultaneous Acts. Act 3: Ocean Offering (2023). Left: Author carrying beech trunk across Kouchibouguac estuary (Canada) to the Atlantic. Right: Brother offering pine trunk to the Caribbean Sea at Boca Tocuyo estuary (Venezuela). Photo: SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art.

Acknowledgments: My deepest gratitude goes to my friend and collaborator Roraima Ramos, whose logistical expertise in Venezuela made our simultaneous acts possible across borders. I am profoundly thankful to the campesinos of Cocorote, especially Sr Solano Fonseca and Arnaldo Escalona, whose vision and solidarity have not only enriched this research but also deeply moved me. This project was enriched through conversations on family history with my brother, Manuel Gruber Paris. I am also grateful to the editors of Gatherings, Platform, vol. 17, no. 2, Grace Joseph and Milo Harries, for their insightful feedback and careful reading of this article. Finally, I acknowledge all the more-than-human participants whose presence guided this forward. ¡Gracias!

Works Cited

Abreu, Hernán. Frente Guerrillero Manuel Ponte Rodríguez. Fundación Editorial El perro y la rana, 2017.

Aguilar, Paloma, and Iosif Kovras. ‘Explaining Disappearances as a Tool of Political Terror’. International Political Science Review, vol. 40, no. 3, June 2019, pp. 437-52, https://doi.org/10.1177/0192512118764410.

Biemann, Ursula. Forest Law. 2014, https://geobodies.org/art-and-videos/forest-law/.

Bloch, Ernst. Can Hope Be Disappointed? Translated by Andrew Joron, Stanford UP, 1998.

---. ‘Introduction’, The Principle of Hope. Vol. 1., translated by Neville Plaice et al., MIT Press, 1995, pp. 3-20.

---. The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays. MIT Press, 1988.

Butler, Judith. Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Harvard UP, 2015.

The Canadian Encyclopedia. ‘Mi’kmaq’. 2008, https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/micmac-mikmaq.

Caycedo, Carolina. Be Dammed, 2013, https://kadist.org/program/carolina-caycedo-be-dammed.

Charron, Marie-Ève. ‘Une muséologie inclusive à la manière de Stanley Février’. Le Devoir, 18 June 2022,

https://www.ledevoir.com/culture/arts-visuels/723831/arts-visuels-une-museologie-inclusive-a-la-maniere-de-stanley-fevrier

Daza-Paris, Livia. Simultaneous Acts, Canada and Venezuela. Act 1: Gathering Tree Trunks, 2023,  https://vimeo.com/liviadazaparis/simultaneousacts1.

---. Simultaneous Acts, Canada and Venezuela. Act 2: Letters and Tree Trunk Ceremony, 2023, https://vimeo.com/liviadazaparis/simultaneousacts3canada

---. Simultaneous Acts. Act 3: Ocean offering, Canada, 2023, https://vimeo.com/liviadazaparis/simultaneousacts3canada

---. Simultaneous Acts. Act 3: Ocean offering, Venezuela, 2023, https://vimeo.com/liviadazaparis/simultaneousacts3venezuela

---. Despedidas para Regresos (Farewells for a Return), 2022,

https://vimeo.com/liviadazaparis/despedidas-farewells

---. En la Montaña, 2019, https://vimeo.com/liviadazaparis/enlamontana-atthemountain 

---. Personal exchange during the Skinner Releasing Teacher Training Intensive, August 2001, Vashon Island, Washington State, US.

---. ‘Unearthing Undercover: Intimations Relating Campesinos, the More-than-Human and the Politically Disappeared in My Art Practice’. Performance Research, vol. 26, no. 8, 2022, pp. 111-15, https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2021.2088114.

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Footnotes

[1] In Latin America, the Spanish term campesino, meaning land labourer, embodies the ethnic, class, and historical identities of African, Indigenous, and mestizo origins (Llamojha Mitma and Heilman 11). I have italicized campesino in the text in this prologue only.

[2] While Aguilar and Kovras use ‘enforced disappearance' (437-439), a term also formalized by the UN (2010), I use ‘political disappearance’ – a direct translation of desaparecido político from my Latin American upbringing and the term employed by Subcomandante Marcos in his work ‘To the Relatives of the Politically Disappeared’.

[3] Boca de Tocuyo means ‘Tocuyo’s (river) mouth’. While researching the meaning of the word Tocuyo, I came across a text by a Venezuelan historian suggesting that the term originates from the Quechua Indigenous nation, which inhabits the South American Andes (Rodríguez Rojas 42). Lara State, home to El Tocuyo and Cocorote, lies within the Andean mountainous region of Venezuela.

[4] Kouchibouguac is a Mi’kmaq word, meaning ‘river of the long tides’. The Mi’kmaq Indigenous nation is among the original inhabitants of Atlantic Canada. The Canadian Encyclopedia has the following information: ‘Oral history and archaeological evidence place the Mi’kmaq in their Mi’kma’gi territory for more than 10,000 years’.

[5] ‘Fallen’, rather than ‘killed’, is a dignified term for revolutionaries who died for their cause, mirroring the Spanish caído from my upbringing.

[6] En la Montaña (2019), shown at Un dos tres por mí y mis compañeras, Optica Gallery, Montreal, January 2020, curated by Nuria Carton de Grammont. 

[7] Sociologist Orlando Fals Borda, a pioneer of 'participatory action research' (PAR), developed this methodology to address specific Latin American realities and needs (17).

[8] The notion of the 'not-yet' is an important precursor to 'utopian performativity’, a concept introduced by performance studies scholar José Esteban Muñoz. In a 1961 lecture entitled 'Can Hope Be Disappointed?' Bloch situates hope within the realm of the not-yet, '[a] place where entrance and, above all, final content are marked by an enduring indeterminacy' (Bloch 341; Muñoz 3). Muñoz draws on Bloch's theories on the emancipatory potential of art in The Principle of Hope to shift the field of performance studies by introducing the concept of utopian performativity.

[9] Galindo’s performance, documented in video, references the trials of José Efraín Ríos Montt, Guatemalan president from 1982 to 1983, for genocide and crimes against humanity. Tierra serves as a poetic metaphor for the atrocities recounted during his trial. In 2013, a court sentenced Ríos Montt to 80 years in prison, but the Constitutional Court overturned the sentence. His retrial was never completed.

[10] Caycedo’s art practice explores societal power dynamics, historical memory, and violence against human and non-human entities. Drawing on embodied knowledge and Indigenous and feminist frameworks, her work challenges the colonial gaze and its role in the privatization and dispossession of land and water

[11] Sotelo explains: ‘I am interested in walking … with groups of peoples from different nationalities: to explore, exhume and transform into something positive what it might mean today—for Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, nationals and foreigners, locals to the region and outsiders—to voluntarily, peacefully and poetically share a moment in the mountainous space of this bleak upland (páramo) near Bogotá’.

[12] Demos writes: ‘[the] fluidity between the human and more-than-human worlds extends to the concept of “rights of nature”: indigenous thinking … never had the kind of theoretical separation between the human realm of culture and the natural realm of the environment … So, the idea of extending a sense of rights to natural subjects is not such a conceptual challenge within indigenous practices’ (‘Rights of Nature’).

[13] The resulting videos of the Simultaneous Acts (2023) project can be accessed through the links in the bibliography.

[14] The Books of Waiting (2014) was part a group exhibition by the “Musée d’art actuel/Département des invisibles” at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (2022), reviewed here:https://www.ledevoir.com/culture/arts-visuels/723831/arts-visuels-une-museologie-inclusive-a-la-maniere-de-stanley-fevrier.

[15] My 2012 conversation with Sr Solano is partly documented in my video Despedidas para Regresos | Farewells for a Return (2022). In my article ‘Unearthing Undercover’ I explore attunements that emerged from my experience with Sr Solano, the campesinos, and the land. Sr Solano also told me that the government had implemented a tree-planting campaign, introducing pines from North America to plant in the area where my father was disappeared. Ironically, even as the terrain is unsuitable for these pines to thrive, decades later, they endure, albeit precariously.

[16] During the deforestation between 2020 and 2022, I heard about newly discovered mass graves from Franco-era Spain. Although I cite the following 2023 article, the news echoed at that time with my reflections on disappearance and burial sites. Archaeologist Juan Manuel Guijo, who reconnects victims of political disappearances with their families through DNA, remarked ‘we have witnessed a horror which seems like something from Medieval Spain’ (Keeley), underscoring the haunting parallels that arose during that period.

[17] Harjo credits African American scholar and poet Audre Lorde for inspiration in this poem.

[18] Operation Condor (approximately 1970-1988) was a US-backed program of repression and terror that coincided with the South American extreme right-wing military dictatorships of Augusto Pinochet in Chile, Jorge Rafael Videla in Argentina, and regimes in Brazil, Uruguay, Bolivia, and Paraguay. Political scientist J. Patrice McSherry examines this extensively.

[19] I printed copies of my mother’s letters using non-toxic, plant-based ink on acid-free paper that could decompose safely into the soil.

[20] American dancer Joan Skinner developed the Skinner Releasing Technique (hereafter Releasing) in the 1970s, focusing on mind-body connections beyond dualistic frameworks. Having trained directly with Skinner and becoming a certified instructor of Releasing in 2001, I appreciate how she emphasized 'exploring integration and wholeness' (Emslie and Skinner 276). In my experience, whole-self engagement activates bodily systems—muscular, nervous, and skeletal—alongside mental processes and perceptual states. Through poetic imagery, touch, and skeletal alignment, Releasing fosters freedom and fluidity, deepening our connection to both human and more-than-human others.

[21] I write about this project in my article ‘Unexpected Witnesses: An Artistic Practice from a “Plurality of Ways of Knowing” Surrounding Political Disappearance’ (65).

[22] While Muñoz’s work centres on Queer experiences, he also addresses broader minoritarian experiences of exclusion. Reflecting on how colonial power structures marginalize campesinos, more-than-human beings, and the disappeared—leaving them outside the protection of the law—I draw a parallel to Muñoz’s claim that performativity generates modes of belonging within indeterminate temporalities. As he explains, utopian performativity is a ‘manifestation of a “doing” that is in the horizon, a mode of possibility. Performance, seen as utopian performativity, is imbued with a sense of potentiality’ (99). Muñoz’s use of ‘minoritarian’ emphasizes structural exclusion and resistance, extending beyond numerical ‘minority’ status to those marginalized by dominant power structures.

[23] The Kawsak Sacha (Living Forest) Declaration, elaborated by the Sarayaku Kichwa People in 2012, recognizes their ancestral territory as a living, conscious being with rights. The declaration articulates their relation to the forest as an interconnected ecosystem of beings. The Sarayaku have since presented it at multiple international forums including COP21 (2015), IUCN (2016), and COP23 (2017).

[24] Beyond Sophocles’ ancient Greek tragedy Antigone and its meditation on ‘the rights of the dead’, postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak’s ‘right to care’ frames an ethical imperative toward the unburied dead (341). A striking example is the 1990 Oka crisis in Quebec, when a proposed golf course expansion over Mohawk burial grounds sparked conflict with provincial and federal governments, as documented by Abenaki filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin in Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance. Similarly, protests against oil pipeline extension on Sioux burial sites at Standing Rock, South Dakota, were documented by Mexican and Otomi photographer Josué Rivas in Standing Strong. Both photographers witnessed and honoured Indigenous peoples' profound connections to land and ancestors, framing these struggles through 'oppositional poetics' (Hunt) and emancipatory hope.

[25] Personal exchange during the Skinner Releasing Teacher Training Intensive, August 2001, Vashon Island, Washington State, US.