AND AND AND / Event 13 / The Compass of the Midwest Radical Culture Corridor / The Monsanto Hearings / Carbondale IL; Chicago IL; Iowa City IA; others TBA / January 28, 2012
AND AND AND is an artist run initiative, which will use the time between now and dOCUMENTA (13) in June, 2012 to consider with individuals and groups across the world the role art and culture can play today and the constituent publics or communities which could be addressed. The series of interventions, situations, and occurrences entitled AND AND AND are part of dOCUMENTA (13) and will compose a map of emergent positions, concerns, and possible points of solidarity.
Courtroom sketch of Zea Mays testifying. Image by Kristen DeGree
For the thirteenth AND AND AND event, the Compass of the Midwest Radical Culture Corridor will initiate a series of public hearings in order to constitute a trial against the Monsanto Corporation. In four locations in the American Midwest, people will be invited to testify, witness and listen; to offer sounds, images, material artifacts and arguments for inclusion in a discovery process.
The group writes:
“Our focus is on Monsanto’s role in transforming and damaging the ecologies, economies, and social relations of this region. Proceedings will unfold in several stages, and as the deliberation process builds, it will add to the accumulating record of harms perpetrated by this corporation against human and non-human bodies, food, biological processes, weeds, neighborhoods, farmers, alternative forms of knowledge, and finally the environment from which all these entities emerge.
Through this project, we challenge rigid categories of legal protection, and seek an ethics that protects life itself from coercion. We invoke the form of a trial to produce a comprehensive public understanding of harms, and to determine responsibility for those harms. Existing judiciary frameworks are inadequate to the scale and nature of the ongoing damages perpetrated by Monsanto, which, under current law, is granted the rights of a legitimate “person,” while human non-citizens and non-human agents in our biosphere are not recognized. Existing law produces exclusive notions of legitimacy and harm that ignore and damage entities that do not favor a reductive calculus of profit.
Our proposition is to consider all living things as potential plaintiffs in an accounting of Monsanto’s crimes. We submit to public review impacts that are experienced materially and culturally, in the past, the present and extending into our shared future. By expanding notions of legal standing and of legitimate harm, we assert our interdependence. The urgent question is: what will it take to safeguard the interlocked nature of the world against criminally reckless corporate priority?”
The first hearing will take place at:
Time: Saturday, January 28, 2012, 11 am
City: Carbondale IL; Chicago IL; Iowa City IA; others TBA
Country: USA
Location: 37° 43′ 35.11″ N, 89° 13′ 12.97″ W
Address: Lesar Law Building Courtroom, Carbondale
dOCUMENTA (13) is not responsible for the views or factual claims expressed by the artists and artworks it presents.
- Links
- www.documenta.de
- www.andandand.org
- www.midwestradicalculturecorridor.net
