Image credit: Daniella Valz Gen, (be)longing, 2019. Image by Rowan Powell. Courtesy of Daniella Valz Gen. Daniella Valz Gen, ‘On (be)longing as Oracular Practice’
Daniella Valz Gen, ‘On (be)longing as Oracular Practice’
Lecture: Tuesday 25 May 2021, 18:30-20:00
Join Zoom meeting: https://gold-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/91011023874?pwd=bVFuSDQ4cUF5Qk9DelBib3k0RUZWUT09
Meeting ID: 910 1102 3874
Passcode: 056409
In this lecture, Daniella Valz Gen shares the ontologies that foreground their interdisciplinary practice through an exploration of poetics, oracular practice and somatics. Focusing on a process-led approach that challenges the split between mind and body, the work proposes ritual as a way to sensitise the self and others to subtler forms of being present with each other, with our environments, and the other than human. The project (Be)longing is an embodied exploration of communion with the land through the process of embedding a body in the landscape. The work stems from ecological concerns that expand to urgent socio-political issues, and proposes reflections on the questions of:
Where does the migrant body belong?
What does it mean to belong to more than one place?
How do we forge our relationship to the land we occupy?
And how do we forge belonging as an internal experience at every moment?
At the heart of the project exist three landscape interventions that took place at various locations across the UK in the Summer and Autumn of 2019 generating decentralised and urgent discussions around migration.
Daniella Valz Gen is a poet, artist and card reader born in Lima, Peru and based in London. Their work explores the interstices between languages, cultures and value systems with an emphasis on embodiment and ritual, through the mediums of performance, installation, conversation and text. Valz Gen is the author of the poetry collection Subversive Economies (PSS 2018). Their prose has been published in various art and literary journals such as Lish, SALT Magazine, Paperwork Magazine and The Happy Hypocrite, among others. They are currently developing the next stage of their project (be)longing, aseries of immersive elemental rituals. Valz Gen runs monthly gatherings exploring poetic practice in relation to the symbolism of Tarot cards within the container of Sacred Song Tarot. @daniella_vg @sacredsongtarot
What Can A Garden Be?
Lecture and research methods workshops programme 2020-2021
In this series of talks and seminars funded by CHASE, we hear from artists, curators, activists and researchers whose work is grounded in practices of sustainability, decoloniality, permaculture, queering nature, nurturing place-based knowledge, building community and resilience in opposition to colonial imaginaries. The lectures provide the stimulus for PhD workshops addressing key research methods, such as working with ephemeral infrastructures, decolonial strategy, transdisciplinary research that challenges art–science divisions, knowledge sharing, mapping and more-than-human collaborations. In so doing, the series aims to critically address the coloniality of the garden and its role in dispossession and segregation, recalling the etymology of the word ‘garden’ and its roots in the Old English word geard, meaning enclosure. Developing an Art Research Garden at Goldsmiths in the midst of global climate emergency, ecological breakdown and a pandemic that has accelerated racialised policing of green spaces, raises crucial questions about the histories of exclusion and extraction that the Western colonial garden has maintained, be it in the form of pleasure parks, private gardens, nature reserves or botanical gardens. From provision grounds to indigenous land pedagogies, from urban community gardens and allotment plots to the olive grove as place of gathering to share knowledge, and from re-wilding projects and to climate justice work, what are the compelling examples of practices that can we look to in thinking about what a garden could be?
A New Art Research Garden at Goldsmiths
The Art department has initiated plans for an Art Research Garden that will operate as a micro-context from which to observe change in our natural environment, and facilitate a wide range of artistic research into living systems, cultivation and processing of plants, from food to pigments, rewilding, soil care, composting, the benefits of plants in alleviating pollution, eco-pedagogy, and the therapeutic and social benefits of gardening, as well as a space for teaching and public engagement through workshops, performance and other events. The Art Research Garden will support ecological artistic research and teaching, knowledge transfer and public engagement, including outdoor and indoor growing, cooking facilities and a teaching space, all with disabled access. It will provide an experimental laboratory for developing new forms of artistic research that build creativity, resilience and innovation in sustainability in the context of the ecological emergency we face.
In this series of talks and seminars funded by CHASE, we hear from artists, curators, activists and researchers whose work is grounded in practices of sustainability, decoloniality, permaculture, queering nature, nurturing place-based knowledge, building community and resilience in opposition to colonial imaginaries. The lectures provide the stimulus for PhD workshops addressing key research methods, such as working with ephemeral infrastructures, decolonial strategy, transdisciplinary research that challenges art–science divisions, knowledge sharing, mapping and more-than-human collaborations. In so doing, the series aims to critically address the coloniality of the garden and its role in dispossession and segregation, recalling the etymology of the word ‘garden’ and its roots in the Old English word geard, meaning enclosure. Developing an Art Research Garden at Goldsmiths in the midst of global climate emergency, ecological breakdown and a pandemic that has accelerated racialised policing of green spaces, raises crucial questions about the histories of exclusion and extraction that the Western colonial garden has maintained, be it in the form of pleasure parks, private gardens, nature reserves or botanical gardens. From provision grounds to indigenous land pedagogies, from urban community gardens and allotment plots to the olive grove as place of gathering to share knowledge, and from re-wilding projects and to climate justice work, what are the compelling examples of practices that can we look to in thinking about what a garden could be?
A New Art Research Garden at Goldsmiths
The Art department has initiated plans for an Art Research Garden that will operate as a micro-context from which to observe change in our natural environment, and facilitate a wide range of artistic research into living systems, cultivation and processing of plants, from food to pigments, rewilding, soil care, composting, the benefits of plants in alleviating pollution, eco-pedagogy, and the therapeutic and social benefits of gardening, as well as a space for teaching and public engagement through workshops, performance and other events. The Art Research Garden will support ecological artistic research and teaching, knowledge transfer and public engagement, including outdoor and indoor growing, cooking facilities and a teaching space, all with disabled access. It will provide an experimental laboratory for developing new forms of artistic research that build creativity, resilience and innovation in sustainability in the context of the ecological emergency we face.
Other events in the series