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.
