Radha D’Souza, Professor of Law at Westminster Law School, has unveiled details of her collaboration with Dutch artist Jonas Staal for their ‘Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes’ exhibition this autumn.
Opening on 24 September at Framer Framed in Amsterdam, with the performative hearings taking place from 28-31 October, the project consists of a large-scale installation in the form of a tribunal that prosecutes intergenerational climate crimes.
The project focuses on the legal frameworks established by the Dutch state system alongside corporations registered in the Netherlands. The ‘Court for Intergenerational Crimes’ framework is based on D’Souza’s book ‘What’s Wrong with Rights?: Social Movements, Law and Liberal Imaginations’ (Pluto,2018).
The exhibition aims to provide evidence of past and present climate crimes by looking at their impact on the here and now, as well as on planetary life in the future. With the hearings being documented online, the evidence and testimony files will be presented to institutional and activist organisations.
Taking inspiration from the courts, the exhibition will also feature an ecology popularised by extinct animals, plants, and ammonite fossils alongside the prosecutors, witnesses and the public. These ancestors will hold evidence of past intergenerational climate crimes, as well as contribute to its justice in the present and future.
When describing the exhibition, academic, writer, lawyer and activist Professor D’Souza said: “I would say the exhibition is a unique interdisciplinary collaboration in that it uses the arts to critique the law and uses the law to reimagine the world.”
In a conversation for Errant Journal, D’Souza also added: “One of the attributes of the human species is that they must, necessarily, engage with nature through work to reproduce the conditions necessary for life. This attribute, the necessity to labour in order to exist, the need to interact with nature to live, makes the human species distinct from others. When human beings work with nature, they form a bond with nature and with each other through their work. These bonds are the basis of community and place formations.
“European modernisation ruptured those bonds. It transformed places into territories that require authorisation by states through grants of citizenship for people to live and work. My point is, whatever the law may say about property and labour markets, the reality of life has reaffirmed over and over again through crises after crises that have riddled capitalist modernity, that it is not possible to reproduce the conditions necessary for human life when the relationship between nature and people is ruptured, or when it becomes an abusive relationship.”
Find out more information about the exhibition on the Framer Framed website.
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