The series Creators facing Climate Emergency provides a platform for conversations between artists, thinkers and scientists to create new narratives, raise awareness and incite action in the face of climate change, using artists as mediators. These conversations also propose new ways of producing and displaying the arts, and invite on this occasion the artist Rossella Biscotti and the International lawyer Valérie Cabanes to explore the dialectics between visual arts and ecocide.
Guests: Rossella Biscotti, visual artist and Valérie Cabanes, lawyer in International Law with an expertise in environmental rights.
Moderated by Stefano Vendramin, curator in art related to ecology.
Rossella Biscotti (1978, Italy) graduated from the Accademia di Belle Arti (Naples) and the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten (Amsterdam). She uses montage as a gesture to reveal individual narratives and their relation to society. In her cross-media practice, cutting across filmmaking, performance and sculpture, she explores and reconstructs social and political moments from recent times through the subjectivity and experiences of individuals often posed against the backdrop of institutional system. Traces of people’s life, objects and ideas are sensibly weaved together into new visual narratives.
The most recent and long-term project The Journey, started in 2016, connects scientific research, oceanography and environmental datas of a marble bock from the Carrara quarry in Italy into the Mediterranean sea (between Italy, Tunisia, Libya and Malta).
Biscotti has taken part in major international exhibitions, including the 55th Venice Biennale and 13th Istanbul Biennale, dOCUMENTA 13, and Manifesta 9. Her work has been presented in solo exhibitions (Fondazione Ratti, Como, daadgalerie, Berlin, Protocinema Istanbul, V-A-C foundation at GULAG History State Museum in Moscow, Wiels, Brussels, Sculpture Center and e-flux, New York). The artist has received several art awards including ACACIA Prize for Contemporary Art, the Premio della 16e Quadriennale d’Arte di Roma, The Premio Michelangelo at XIV International Sculpture Biennale of Carrare, The 2nd Prix de Rome in the Netherlands and the Premio NY, in collaboration with the Columbia University, New York.
Valérie Cabanes is a lawyer in international law with an expertise in international humanitarian law and human rights law. In 2013, she participated in the launch of a European citizens’ initiative proposing a European directive on the crime of ecocide. Then in 2015 she worked on a proposal for amendments to the Statute of the International Criminal Court on the crime of ecocide. At the approach of the COP21, she founded with a group of lawyers the NGO Notre Affaire à Tous (Our shared responsability) which works for a climate justice in France. She also co-organized the International Tribunal on the rights of nature which took place in Paris in December 2015. Valérie Cabanes is a member of the scientific committee of the journal La pensée écologique (The ecological thinking) and that of the Zoein Foundation, newly founded in Geneva, which support projects reducing inequalities and promoting ecological and social sustainability.
She contributed to many collective books and is the author of Un nouveau Droit pour la Terre, pour en finir avec l’écocide (Paris, Seuil, 2016) translated by Natraj Publishers under the title Rights for the Earth (New Delhi, 2018), and Homo Natura, en harmonie avec le vivant (Paris, Buchet/Chastel, 2016).