---------- Forwarded message --------- From: maria lucia cruz correia<mluciacruzcorreia@gmail.com> Date: Tue, Feb 12, 2019 at 12:27 PM Subject: PREMIERE of Voice of Nature - The Trial at Court of Appeal in Ghent To: <michelsub2004@gmail.com>
Voice of Nature - The Trial coming soon in Ghent! It is now almost 2 years since I've left on a field research to Ecuador, the only place in the world
Voice of Nature - The Trial
coming soon in Ghent!
It is now almost 2 years since I’ve left on a field research to Ecuador, the only place in the world that acknowledges the rights of nature in the constitution. It has been a long artistic research, mostly focused on possible legal frameworks that allow either to represent non-humans in court or to recognize ecocide.
Non of those are being applied yet or envisioned in a near future.
The result of this research is a performance!
We will premiere on the 1st of march in Vooruitkunstcentrum, and we are thankful to present in the context of the festival ‘same same but different’.
As a location, we chose the Court of Appeal of Gent (Hof van Beroep), as a statement of activation.
As a response to the many legal challenges we face in representing non-humans in a courtroom, more then a year ago, I started my quest to become a guardian of nature. For that, I’ve dedicated daily attention, to perform rituals and embodiments with non-human others. As a result I’ve archived these exercises in a book.
The performance in itself will be a proposal for justice, the kind of justice nature needs, imagining a universe of kinship and rites as an embodiment of non-humans. We will propose collective rituals featuring the unknown and the unconscious part of nature in us.
History is asking us to become healers,
warriors, guardians, keepers, defenders.
To speak on behalf of future and past generations.
To amplify the voice of nature, animals, plants, rivers, land...
We have harmed enough, we have been harmed enough.
Enough is enough.
Let us stop harming, let us make amends, let us repair the irreparable.
As additional information, I would like to mention small achievements, within our collaboration with experts:
Hendrik Schoukens, environmental lawyer and scientific researcher at the department of Public, European and International Law of Ghent University. We invited him to imagine ‘an ideal world’, juridically speaking, by proposing a number of important legal alterations to the existing legal framework. Apart from that, there was a sense of emergency to involve law students in the creation of this piece. As an outcome, the concept of ‘ecocide’ was explicitly for the first time included in the curriculum of law students at Ghent University. Students are now working on papers concerning ecocide law, rights of nature and indigenous rights. For, if the new generation of lawyers is not fully aware of it, how can we realistically hope for the concept of ecocide to be included into the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court?
As a proposal, the piece is looking at restorative justice and therefore we collaborated with Brunilda Pali from the Institute of Criminology Leuven, to discover artistically speaking how to use restorative justice in order to prevent environmental crimes, but also to tackle the fact that if we need to prevent the harm, there should be a way to restore ourselves as humans. In restorative justice, crime is not seen as a break in the law but a violation/harm of people and relationships. It creates obligations to make things right. Its processes are always voluntary, participatory and involve everyone affected. The outcomes are reconciliation, restoration, and reassurance that the harm will not happen again.
Voice of nature will be part of the seminar: https://www.law.kuleuven.be/apps/activiteiten/en/portaal/index/view_activiteit/4569
Very thankful for the artistic team who has been crucial to bring this challenging project together:
Dramaturgy Ingrid Vranken Performance Caroline Daish Systemic Constellation Navigator Luea Ritter Research contribution Sébastien Hendrickx Sound Design Joao Bento Light Design Vinny Jones
Video Mark Pozlep Advise Jeroen Peeters, Starhawk
Costume Design Anne-Catherine Kunz Legal fact checking Hendrik Schoukens & Juan Auz Research documentation Mark Pozlep & Hana Vodeb Restorative Justice collaborator Brunilda Pali Intern Maíra Wiener Technician Alain Decoen Production Tineke de Meyer
Co-producers Vooruit, Kaaitheater, Bunker, Workspacebrussels and Het Theaterfestival (Roel Verniers prijs 2017).
Residencies No Lugar (EC), Center for Creative Ecologies /Tj Demos (US), Artsadmin (UK), BUDA kunstcentrum (BE), WP Zimmer (BE).
With the support of the Flemish Community,Imagine 2020, and Creative Europe Culture.
