Engaged with the realms of the symbolic, Daniella Valz Gen’s work channels poetic voice through an oracular practice, disrupting and queering forms of meaning making to challenge linear narratives.
Throughout their residency, Daniella Valz Gen will be sharing iterations of their ongoing research project All tangled up with beasts through a series of expanded poetry, performances and texts.This project reclaims, reimagines and embodies mythological characters that have been othered, misunderstood or misrepresented.
Process-led, Daniella Valz Gen’s work explores poetic experience through different forms of reading, writing, performing and making. They’re invested in a relational and responsive approach to land, place, and the other-than-human. Born in Peru and based in London, Valz Gen’s work highlights the interstices between languages, cultures and value systems as areas where potential new meanings can arise.
(Be)longing (2019) realised site-specific landscape interventions examining migration and ecology in post Brexit Britain. In 2022 Valz Gen took part in the OrganizmoBloom residency, ‘Body, Weaving and Territory’ (British Council/European Alternatives) in an indigenous community in the Amazon, which gave space for an immersive process of evaluation of indigenous technologies, in relation to language, environment and craft.
Valz Gen’s work has been shown at Glasgow International, SPILL Festival, Aichi Triennale, Gropius Bau among others. Subversive Economies, their first poetry collection, was published by PSS Press in 2018. Their writing has been featured in The Happy Hypocrite, Map Magazine, Salt, and others.
Image: from (be)longing (2019) 35mm slide film. Photo: Rowan Powell
Curator: Public Programmes, Jane Scarth interviews Daniella Valz Gen about their work and plans for the residency.
Thu 23 May
An experimental poetic ritual that channels the voice of the god Chiron, through text, analogue imagery and soundscapes. Composed live in collaboration with Belladonna Paloma.
Thu 30 Jan
An experimental poetic ritual that retells the story of a gorgeous girl turned monster. Composed live in collaboration with experimental musician Ana Tiene (F*choir, Trouble Wanted), Gorgeous explores narratives of power, desire and trauma, through text, film and sound.
Thu 24 Apr
Soothsayer is an experimental poetic ritual of divination through a live reading of the sky and the atmosphere in Gallery 2 during the performance. Composed live in collaboration with experimental musician Ana Tiene (F*choir, Trouble Wanted), Soothsayer enacts oracular practice in real time and explores the ritual nature of percussion as a conduit for divination.
The first in a new series of texts as part of All tangled up with beasts by Daniella Valz Gen.
The second in a new series of texts as part of All tangled up with beasts by 2024-25 Writer in Residence Daniella Valz Gen.
