geobodies
Ursula Biemann
art and videos / forest law geobodies-org menú
art and videos /forest law
  • forest law
  • forest law
  • forest law
  • forest law
  • forest law
  • forest law
  • forest law
  • forest law
  • forest law
  • forest law
  • forest law
  • forest law
  • forest law
  • forest law
  • forest law
  • forest law
  • forest law
  • forest law
  • forest law
  • forest law
2014

forest law

sync two-channel video installation 38’

At the heart of Forest Law is a series of landmark legal cases that bring the forest to court and plead for the rights of nature. One particularly paradigmatic trial that has recently been won by the indigenous people of Sarayuku based on their cosmology of the living forest. The project draws from research carried out by the artist and Brazilian architect Paulo Tavares in the oil-and-mining frontier in the Ecuadorian Amazon— one of the most biodiverse and mineral-rich regions on Earth, currently under pressure from the dramatic expansion of large-scale extraction activities.

Among those interviewed in the double-channel video is Sarayaku spokesperson José Gualinga, who explains how the multispecies forest includes a biodiverse web of life on which Indigenous people rely, and without which Sarayaku life would lose all meaning. The forest community forms an indissoluble network of relations between diverse beings, the many perspectives of which – for Amazon anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, corresponding to Amerindian cosmologies – are translated into the multiple views of the video installation itself (T.J. Demos)

Wait a moment, please