On Poetic Testimony – Helene Kazan

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.
The events take place under the Angewandte COVID regulations: https://www.dieangewandte.at/covid19
 
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.
 
Photocredit: Still from documentary
                                          film ‘Kivalina, The Coming Storm’, 2013
Photocredit: Still from documentary film ‘Kivalina, The Coming Storm’, 2013
Lecture