International Programmes in Sustainable Developments
and Vienna MA in Applied Human Rights are organising a common lecture series on the relations between art,
sustainability, human rights, and environmental justice.
Drawing on audio/visual material
from across temporal and spatial contexts in her lecture Helene Kazan unpacks the proposition of poetic testimony:
a means of expressing and translating the violent and disproportionate human and non-human effects of a lived-condition of
risk. By engaging feminist, de-colonial, critical legal and artistic methods through poetic testimony, an attempt is made
at dismantling asymmetric legal power structures. These allow state-perpetrated violence, experienced through armed conflict
and climate disaster, to fall outside of most frames of accountability in international law.
Helene
Kazan is a research-based practitioner and senior lecturer in Critical Theory at the School of the Arts, Faculty
of Technology, Design and Environment, Oxford Brookes University. Her work investigates a lived-condition of 'risk' produced
through capitalism and conflict, and analyzed at the material intersection of international law and architecture. Engaging
methods of poetic testimony as a means for dismantling the violent effects of risk.
