DANIELLA VALZ GEN

Daniella Valz Gen is a poet, artist and card reader. 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 amongst others. They’re currently developing the next stage of their project (be)longing, a series of immersive elemental rituals.

Valz Gen has been focusing the last two years on integrating their oracular practice with their art and poetry. They run monthly gatherings exploring poetics in relation to the symbolism of Tarot cards within the container of Sacred Song Tarot.

On craft as oracular practice

On craft as oracular practice focuses on the The Magician’s tools –a representation of elemental forces– in relation to the act of creation.

In this lecture Daniella Valz Gen shares the ontologies that foreground their interdisciplinary practice through an exploration of poetics, divination 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.

Throughout the lecture the artist will share a series of works that stem from elemental ritual practice, including their project (Be)longing, an embodied exploration of communion with the land through the process of embedding a body in the landscape. This work stems from ecological concerns that expand to urgent socio-political issues, and proposes reflections on the questions of migration.