Maria Lucia Cruz Correia (BE): Voice of Nature: The Trial

Thursday 12.9. 18.00

Friday 13.9. 17.00

Pohjois-Savo Region Hall | Sepänkatu 1, Kuopio

Voice of nature: The Trial is a site-specific court piece, in which we investigate ecocide* and the possibility of making a new proposal for the justice-system.

It is as an experiment with how law and justice can serve the ecosystem by proposing a reconfiguration of a court room. It explores the difficulties of granting personhood to non-humans, or how to make a mountain or a river into a legal entity. The audience is invited into a process of transformation through the realms of fiction, magic and documentary, that can guide them to become guardians of nature.

In order to propose a new type of ‘verdict’ in the form of a restorative contract, we experiment with combining elements from a conventional court, restorative justice and rituals. In this trial, humans and other then humans come together to find a collective language, focused on inter-being, intersectionality and restoration.

*’Ecocide’ is a term referring to the crime of damaging, destructing or annihilating ecosystems, wether by human agency or other. Despite the global reality of it, this crime remains currently unmentioned in the Rome Statute of the international Criminal Court.

Duration 2 hours.

Maria Lucia Cruz Correia’s artistic work speaks her deep engagement for environmental issues. She reacts to the ecological crimes of our times by bringing audiences into a participatory environments in collaboration with scientists, activists and lawyers. Correia’s work is informed by contemporary discourses on the anthropocene, climate change and processes of restoration. Correia proposes participatory articulations by creating temporary autonomous platforms which create moments of disruption and harmony between seemingly disparate bodies of knowledge, cultural traditions, resilience, value systems and social transformation. In 2017 she received the Roel Verniers Prize at the Theatre Festival. Since 2012, she is part of the city residents program of Vooruit. Her work is supported by the 2020 Network.