With: Elizabeth Gallón Droste, Dr. Christiane Gerstetter (ClientEarth)
Moderated by: Sina Ribak, Zabriskie Buchladen (Lorena Carràs, Jean-Marie Dhur)
At: Climate Care Festival, Critterkratia, Floating University
In various countries, including Ecuador, Colombia and Aotearoa/New Zealand, the rights of entities such as mountains, forests and rivers have already been enshrined in their respective constitutions. The recent “Mar Menor Act“ in Spain is the first legal text in Europe to give a lagoon the status of a subject of rights.
Is legal personhood a tool to protect the rights and wellbeing of entities of more-than-human-nature? Are “rights of nature” able to halt destructive profit-driven extractivist actions? Or is the granting of rights yet another anthropocentric move? What can we learn in this respect from Indigenous thinking?
In this conversation about the relations of mining, law and more-than-human nature, artist Elizabeth Gallón Droste together with legal expert Dr. Christiane Gerstetter discuss the violence of extractivism in relation to the shift towards the “rights of nature”.
Gallón Droste's work focuses on socio-environmental crises and conflicts around bodies of water, affective geographies and relational ontologies. She is navigating the spokespersonship of the Atrato River, northwestern Colombia, by ethno-territorial organisations, given the recognition of the basin – in the department of Chocó-Colombia – as a Subject of Rights. Additionally, we invite the senior lawyer Dr. Gerstetter, whose research on the role of law in trade and environmental law and policies will help us to understand socio-environmental transformation processes and the building of new legal frameworks aiming at climate justice.
The panel will be moderated by Sina Ribak, researcher for ecologies & the Arts, with Lorena Carràs and Jean-Marie Dhur, founders of Zabriskie, a bookstore specialising in nature/ ecology, subcultures and visions.
Elizabeth Gallón Droste (1991, Bogotá) conducts multimodal, artistic research. She navigates ecologies and interspecific patches between the multiple realities that constantly re-create landscapes through evocations, affective ecologies and relationalionalities, focusing on rivers as articulators of extensive live networks of re-existence. She collaborates with several networks and projects oscillating between art and science, which aim to open up sensory and relational attunements. Currently, Elizabeth is a Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology at the Temporalities of Future graduate program at Freie Universität Berlin.
Dr. Christiane Gerstetter (ClientEarth)
Dr. Christiane Gerstetter is a Germany-trained lawyer. She works in the Berlin office of the international environmental law charity ClientEarth. Apart from her work at ClientEarth, she has been involved for many years in social movements, focussing especially on climate justice and global solidarity. She has published various academic and other papers on trade and environmental law and policies as well as socio-environmental transformation processes and the role of law in it.
Lorena Carràs
Lorena Carràs is co-founder and co-curator of the Zabriskie bookstore in Berlin. Zabriskie is not only a shop but also a place where knowledge and experiences are shared through readings, workshops, walks and other events. She has a transdisciplinary background in philology, music, photography and cultural mediation. As an event curator, she is mostly interested in the intersections of arts, sound and ecology. Between 2009 and 2013 she ran a non-profit project space in Berlin-Kreuzberg, where she curated installations and performances. Her main interests are: radical listening practices, anarchism, fermentation, collective practices in rural areas and experimental libraries and publications.
Jean-Marie Dhur
Jean-Marie Dhur is co-founder and co-curator of the Zabriskie bookstore in Berlin. Zabriskie is not only a shop but also a place where knowledge and experiences are shared through readings, workshops, walks and other events. Jean-Marie’s main interests are indigenous cosmologies, the connections between landscape and myths, the teachings of the wild, botany and bird watching. He is also host of music show Abendlandung on community station Cashmere Radio and djs as Fog Puma. He has been hosting concerts and DJ nights at the intersections of ambient music, experimental pop and leftfield dance sounds for more than 15 years.
Sina Ribak is an independent researcher for ecologies & the arts trained in land use, conservation, landscape gardening and Collective Practices Research. Since 2017, she runs the Berlin-based Between Us and Nature – A Reading Club with E.-F. Kovacovsky. With her focus on bioeconomy and biodiversity, she co-created formats for encounters at documenta15, HKW and Museum für Naturkunde Berlin. Speaking from a more-than-human perspective, she contributed to JvE Academie, Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm, and the University of Augsburg. To her, social and ecological justice means being involved in a solidarity-based agriculture community and in translocal ecosystems aimed at collaboratively shifting paradigms.
