Period
2021 - ongoing
Proposed by
Visible Team
Location
various locations
About the project
The Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes (CICC), initiated by artist Jonas Staal and activist-scholar Radha D’Souza, is an ongoing tribunal that prosecutes states and corporations for their role in climate destruction. Conceived as both a legal imaginary and an artistic institution, the CICC challenges capitalist-imperialist modernity by introducing a “law of life” that centres interdependence, regeneration, and intergenerational responsibility, rather than proprietary notions of rights.
Each hearing brings together judges, prosecutors, witnesses, and the public to confront crimes against not only past and present communities but also future generations and non-human life forms. The CICC stages alternative forms of justice that extend solidarity across species and time, imagining courts that dismantle the extractive logics of fossil capitalism and articulate a politics of life.
Since its inception, the CICC has been staged in diverse contexts, including Serpentine Galleries, Kunsthalle Münster, Framer Framed in Amsterdam, the 14th Gwangju Biennale, and Seoul’s Oil Tank Culture Park, where the hearings took place symbolically in a former oil depot. Each iteration responds to the specific histories of corporate and state violence in its local setting, from Dutch imperial legacies to the military-industrial complex in Korea.
The project mobilises a wide community of Indigenous representatives, activists, academics, unionists, progressive lawyers, artists, and cultural workers, making space for collective organising and movement building. Fossils, banners of extinct species, and woven plants act as nonhuman witnesses, expanding the court’s constituency beyond the human.
The CICC continues to evolve through the commitment of its participants, who see it as both an artwork and a real-world call to action: to imagine and perform institutions of justice that existing frameworks cannot provide, and to demand accountability for climate crimes across generations.
External links
About the artist
Jonas Staal is a visual artist whose work deals with the relation between art, democracy, and propaganda. He is the founder of the artistic and political organization New World Summit (2012–ongoing). Together with Florian Malzacher he co-directs the training camp Training for the Future (2018-ongoing), and with human rights lawyer Jan Fermon he initiated the collective action lawsuit Collectivize Facebook (2020-ongoing). With writer and lawyer Radha D’Souza he founded the Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes (2021-ongoing) and with Laure Prouvost he is co-administrator of the Obscure Union.
Exhibition-projects include Museum as Parliament (with the Democratic Self-Administration of Rojava, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, 2018-ongoing), We Demand a Million More Years (Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, 2022) and Extinction Wars (with Radha D'Souza, Gwangju Museum of Art, 2023). His projects have been exhibited widely at venues such as the V&A in London, Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, M_HKA in Antwerp, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Centre Pompidou-Metz and the Nam June Paik Art Center in Seoul, as well as the 7th Berlin Biennale, the 31st São Paulo Biennale and the 12th Taipei Biennale.
