blindspots
BLIND SPOTS is a pilot project of the Fondazione Venezia per la Ricerca sulla Pace as part of their ongoing research in the role of memory in processes of peace building and European integration. As scholars of international law, members of the foundation sought media that might draw a non-specialist public to the ever-relevant subjects of their studies.
Intent on introducing alternative instruments of communication as vehicles for social change, the foundation pursued a partnership with Phonodia, the Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia’s online poetry audio archive.
The quote from Coleridge, “poetry; the best words in the best order,” might equally apply to the creative skills necessary to formulating laws, including the coining of words to describe the indescribable. In some departments of jurisprudence, poetry is taught for its tools of analysis of complexities and ambiguities. Yet the same tools that relieve poetry of imposing a rational system of judgment and decision and puts poetry at ease with uncertainty stand in contrast to the specificity sought in law.
BLIND SPOTS, in its interweaving of law and poetry, is about processes of becoming, as a project, as a spur to interpretation, as a challenge to the framing that determines individuals’ perceptions, attitudes, behavior. The project is launched as a platform for reflection; as it evolves, it aspires to stimulating critical engagement and inquiry.
This first edition of BLIND SPOTS initiates a project whose purpose is to track convergences and commonalities between participating poets’ diverse backgrounds and experiences – as victims, witnesses, the inheritors of crimes – and recurring interconnected themes in human rights.
By linking the themes to the poets’ recordings, and by providing supporting information to assist in contextualizing both the poet and their poems, BLIND SPOTS aims to arouse its visitor’s imagination through hearing the voice of the Other.
With BLIND SPOTS, the Fondazione Venezia per la Ricerca sulla Pace, in partnership with Phonodia of the Universita’ di Ca’ Foscari di Venezia, deploys the voices of poets as agents of transformation, for uncovering ... blind spots.
www.blindspots.eu