LIMBO - A GENEALOGY OF ABSENSE

KABK Graduation Catalogue

Lorenzo Piero Holder III

2025
Bachelor Fine Arts
Mixed media Performance Video
Family Conflict Identity

Keywords: Archive, Family history

Website
Curatorial Work

Holder's practice is rooted in embodied research, ancestral inquiry, and the affective residues of archival labor.

Body of Evidence (11:22 min, 2025) is a intervention-based video work that places the artist’s body in silent, unscripted dialogue with institutional archives from Washington D.C. to Berlin, Germany. Through gestures that are at once subtle, strained, and deliberate, Holder intervenes within spaces historically structured to catalog and contain memory. These corporeal acts do not seek to interpret the archive but rather to unsettle it, foregrounding the body as both a site and method of knowing.

Holder is an MFA scholarship recipient and the 2025 Dean’s Award honoree at the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences in Washington, D.C.

Body of Evidence
Body of Evidence(2025) [Duration 11:22 min] In Body of Evidence, Lorenzo Piero Holder III uses their own body as both subject and instrument in a series of unscripted interventions at historical archives. Drawing from personal and ancestral narratives, the work explores how the body can disrupt institutional memory and reanimate forgotten or suppressed histories. These gestures, subtle, contorted, and often silent, offer a form of embodied research that challenges conventional archival practices and opens space for mourning, resistance, and reconciliation.
LIMBO is an artist book with ephemera, US military dog tags, stationary clips, and mixed media remnants, (2025), 19 cm x 24 cm. LIMBO gathers fragments from Lorenzo Piero Holder III’s investigative process including ephemera from the Library of Congress, US military dog tags, and stationary accessories from the Federal Archive in Berlin. The materials are assembled into an artist book that exists between document and altar. Each page holds traces of physical art making and archival inquiry, offering a quiet negotiation between presence and absence, testimony and residue.
Forensic Silence is an installatino made of shredded documents and archival fragments (2025). In this work, Lorenzo Piero Holder III shreds a lifetime of official records that once defined an identity, transforming them into fragments of disavowal and refusal. What remains is not absence but a new form of presence, one that resists the authority of fixed narratives and bureaucratic memory. By placing these remnants in dialogue with the archive, the piece challenges how institutions preserve, categorize, and authenticate lives.
FEVER @ The Grey Space In the Middle
Castaway @ Sexyland World Amsterdam
Counter Claim - Art book publication (2024)
Counter Claim - Art publication (2024)