A panel discussing ecological justice and prosecuting the crimes of the British East India Company, with Radha D’Souza and Jonas Staal.
Radha D’Souza and Jonas Staal, the artists behind the Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes (CICC), will introduce why we need to put the law on trial and introduce alternative legal imaginaries and tribunals that can ensure intergenerational justice in the face of catastrophic climate and societal breakdown.
Following the panel on the 4th , the CICC will stage public hearings at Ambika P3 on 5 and 6 April, prosecuting intergenerational climate crimes committed by the British East India Company. The trials will engage human and non-human witnesses to prove that colonial crimes are climate crimes with devastating past impacts that continue to shape our present and future.
From 8 April the space reopens as the CICC School, a series of programmes that further contextualise the project.
CONTRIBUTOR BIOS
Radha D’Souza is a Professor of International Law, Development and Conflict Studies at the University of Westminster (UK). D’Souza is a public intellectual from India where she worked as a trade union organiser in Mumbai and a democratic rights and environmental justice activist. She was a leading participant in the anti-globalisation movements and wrote the concept paper Workers in a Global World (1996) which became the basis for a Asia-wide campaign to oppose WTO proposals to link labour standards to trade agreements and forced the WTO to take the proposal off its agenda. She has written extensively across disciplines for academic and non-academic publications and platforms. Her book Interstate Disputes on Krishna Waters: Law, Science and Imperialism (2006) examines, for the first time, colonial laws and science as vectors for interstate water conflicts over generations in India. Her book What’s Wrong With Rights? Social Movements, Law and Liberal Imaginations (Pluto 2018) forms the conceptual basis for the CICC.
Jonas Staal is a visual artist whose work deals with the relation between art, democracy, and propaganda. Exhibition-projects include We Demand a Million More Years (Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, 2022), Extinction Wars (with Radha D’Souza, Gwangju Museum of Art, 2023) and Propaganda Station (Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, 2024). His projects have been exhibited widely at venues such as the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York, V&A in London, Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, M_HKA in Antwerp, Centre Pompidou-Metz and the Nam June Paik Art Center in Seoul, as well as the 7th Berlin Biennale, the 31st São Paulo Biennale, the 12th Taipei Biennale and the 14th Shanghai Biennale. Publications include Propaganda Art in the 21st Century (The MIT Press, 2019) and Climate Propagandas: Stories of Extinction and Regeneration (The MIT Press, 2024). Staal was the winner of the Prix de Rome Award in 2023.
Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes (CICC): The British East India Company on Trial is a project by Radha D’Souza and Jonas Staal.
Commissioned and produced by Serpentine Ecologies, in partnership with Framer Framed, Amsterdam (long term partner), Law Development & Conflict Research Group, Ecological Futurisms, CREAM, Ambika P3, University of Westminster, Creative Scotland, Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) and Create Ireland. With special thanks to Mondriaan Fund and Jessica Sweidan.
Curated and Produced by Lucia Pietroiusti, Daisy Gould and Isobel Peyton-Jones with Eva Speight.
Research Assistants: Daniel Voskoboynik and Muhammed Ahmedullah
Coordinator and Producer, Studio Jonas Staal: Nadine Gouders
Architect: Paul Kuipers
Graphic design: Remco van Bladel
Photo and video documentation: Ruben Hamelink
Construction, Studio KunstWerk: Michael Klinkenberg and Niklas van Woerden
An Ecological Futurisms initiative at CREAM, Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media, University of Westminster. Led by Neal White, Matthias Kispert, Roshini Kempadoo
Venue managers, Ambika P3: Niall Carter and Eleftherios Dimoulias
The inaugural edition of CICC (Amsterdam, 2021) was commissioned by Framer Framed, Amsterdam. The CICC – The Law on Trial (Seoul, 2022) was produced by Drifting Curriculum and Arts Council Korea (ARKO) and co-produced by Framer Framed, Amsterdam. The CICC – Extinction Wars (Gwangju, 2023) was co-commissioned by the Gwangju Biennale Pavilion Project and Framer Framed, Amsterdam, hosted by Gwangju Museum of Art in partnership with Arts Council Korea (ARKO), the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (Netherlands), Amsterdam Fund for the Arts (AfK), the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Korea, and the Mondriaan Fund.
