A Fragmented Documentation of the Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes was created by four students and two lecturers from the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design (HfG Karlsruhe) who engaged with the assembly as an artistic format and participated in the Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes (CICC), which took place from April 4 to 6, 2025, at Ambika P3 in London.

Conceived by law professor Radha D’Souza and artist Jonas Staal, the CICC examines historical and current climate as well as colonial crimes in the context of public hearings, as part of an ongoing series that has addressed different cases and contexts in the past, with hearings in Amsterdam in 2021 and Gwangju in 2023. This format combines political tribunal and artistic assembly with an immersive spatial staging that at Ambika P3 was centered around a triangle-shaped yellow stage. At its core stood a bush – ‘Comrade Indigo’ –  framed by displays of plants – ancestors who remain in captivity in the British East India Company botanical archive at Kew Gardens, London – and tightly arranged seating that brought the audience into close proximity with the proceedings. The CICC also sees itself as a new approach to jurisdiction that takes into account both human and non-human life and considers negotiations about the past, present and future simultaneously.

There is a voice – but not in the way Western environmental movements often frame it, which sees nature as separate from people, even hostile. This framing is fundamentally problematic. Nature doesn’t need us – we need it. Let’s be very clear: we are fully dependent on it for life, food, everything.

Therefore, the relationship to nature is important. But we don’t think nowadays of that as a relationship because of the separation and the conversion of nature into property. If we keep that dualism of nature and people all the time, then we remain stuck in that frame.

In the hearing yesterday we didn’t try to speak for nature in the court. We tried to show how colonialism served to break that relationship, both for nature – deforestation, the loss of biodiversity – and for people who are born into it. These two things are two sides of the same coin. But because this is intergenerational and because it was the East India Company that started the process of colonial modernity, we focus on how those relationships were broken. One of the critiques of liberal philosophy – from where this all starts – is that everything in nature is looked at as objects or things. […] Before that, land was a hugely complex social relationship between people. But after turning it into private property, people can become wage labourers – otherwise, who would want to go and work in a factory for eight hours a day? […] Now we’d do anything to get an eight-hour-a-day job, because we don’t have any other way of living. The relationship between nature and people – which was a relationship, is broken. […] We felt that we were not really talking about the relationship. […] We wanted to show that the ecological crisis has legal and historical continuity.

—Radha D’Souza in an interview with the authors; full interview available at link below

This trans-temporal and interspecies approach called for methods of documentation that do not follow a purely linear logic. Rather than offering a direct account of the CICC itself, our fragmented documentation reflects our own perspectives, interests and approaches: observation, interpretation and artistic translation came together in a polyphonic process, with our different viewpoints layered, superimposed and set in relation to one another – forming a composite whole that comments on and interprets the event rather than reproducing it.

The Fragmented Documentation of the Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes, created by Constanze Fischbeck, Edona Ibrahimi, Josephine Leicht, Florian Malzacher, Elisabeth Potemkin and Ewa Wasilewska, designed by Joanna Flösser and Moritz Schneider, is presented on a website linked to this article. It opens up perspectives on the spatial, content-related, and temporal structures of the event and shows how our own working process became part of the engagement. Rather than a definitive record of the CICC, this polyphony acts as a reflection, commentary and rendering of our experience. It invites those who could not attend to gain an impression of the event’s complexity and offers participants a space to revisit as well as process their own perceptions. To show or hide different layers for Cases 1, 2 and 3, use the menu bar at the bottom of the screen.

–> To A Fragmented Documentation of the Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes

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