Forest Law (2014)
Ursula Biemann & Paulo Tavares 2-channel video installation, maps, documents, objects, publication
Nicole Horgan
Forest Law (2014) is an exemplary illustration of the artist, researcher and video essayist Ursula Biemann’s pluralistic practice which examines and confronts planetary concerns such as asymmetries of wealth, unequal ecological exchange and climate change by interweaving experimental video, interview, text, photography, cartography and materials. For this particular piece Biemann collaborated with architect and urbanist Paulo Tavares, whose own practice deals with the visual and spatial politics of territorial conflicts and climate change in the Amazon and other frontiers across the third world. Through Forest Law’s two-channel video installation and accompanying documentation including publications, photographs, maps and wall texts, Biemann and Tavares broach the frontiers of the Ecuadorian rainforest to bring to light the work of indigenous lawyers and experts whose work in amending the country’s constitution led to the establishment of fundamental rights to natural eco-systems.
Where the Amazon floodplains meet the Andean mountains, the Ecuadorian rainforest is not only home to indigenous nations and great ethnocultural diversity but also one of the most biodiverse and resource-rich regions of our planet. It is also as a result under extreme pressure from large-scale mineral and oil extraction and exploitation, despite the region being considered the sovereign land of indigenous nations. Forest Law focuses on a series of landmark legal battles held in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights where claims were made for the rights of nature in the face of this thereat of human destruction. A pertinent case that is included within the piece was won by the Sarayaku people, whose legal argument centred on the centrality of the ‘living forest’ in their community’s cosmology, modes of being and ecological survival. For the Sarayaku people, nature is not a passive background against which our human political and economic disputes play out, but instead should be an active legal subject bearing rights of its own. Forest Law brings together various narrative voices to re-tell these cases through personal testimonies and by mapping the historical, political and ecological dimensions of the trials. By doing so, the Forest Law enters into a conversation concerning the entanglements between a plethora of pertinent issues and conflicts such as environmentalism, post-colonialism, social justice, and of the human and the post-human.
Biemann and Tavares’ theoretical intervention narrates a changing planetary reality while figuring and reconfiguring human-planetary relations. Throughout Forest Law, Biemann and Tavares refer to Michel Serres’ text Natural Contract in which he proposes that humans should adhere to a contract with the Earth and its other inhabitants ‘in restitution for and recognition of climate change’. Echoing Donna Harraway’s multi-species concept, the interlocutors within Forest Law imbue this ‘natural contract’ by espousing a move away from an anthropocentric point of view towards a geocentric one in which an approach of radical connectedness serves to deconstruct the hegemonic notion of the human and promotes a unique model of equality. Further to this, in Jennifer Gabrys’ compelling text Becoming Planetary she posits the forest as a form of planetary media on account of it acting as a proxy that records and registers the effects of climate change. For Gabrys, the forest has the potential to enact a crucial role in transforming human-planetary relations as ‘it at once resists a universal and singular view, while also bringing into focus a multiplicity of subjects and inhabitations’. This notion of the forest as a site through which planetary inhabitations are manifested is particularly powerful when one considers the rendering of the forest as a physical, legal and cosmological entity in the cases represented in Forest Law.
Crucially, Forest Law urges us to reconsider our position in the world and of being with the planet. One could argue that the Sarayaku and other narrators featured within Forest Law embody the planet-wary; their planetary perspective is manifest through a greater capacity for empathy and response-ability for our living planet and has resulted in a direct and active confrontation of the dominate globalist and problematic political frameworks.
