The Cosmo-Political Forest
Ursula Biemann
Across the Americas we witness massive extractivist operations weighing down on areas of
extraordinary biodiversity. The search for natural resources in the Western Hemisphere has
led directly to indigenous lands, which in many cases enjoy an abundance of oil, gas and
minerals, as well as healthy forest and rivers. As socially and environmentally devastating as
many of these mining endeavors from Chile to Canada are, the struggles of the indigenous
population for safeguarding their livelihood have helped drive forward groundbreaking legal
reforms. New laws in Ecuador and Bolivia are the expression of an altogether different
human-Earth relationship than the one which led to the present ecological crisis. Forest Law
(2014), undertaken in the oil-and-mining frontier of the Ecuadorian rainforest, brings to light
the legal debates emerging from this unique political-philosophical conjunction. The
multimedia art project has been realized in collaboration with Brazilian architect Paulo
Tavares whose long-term research of the politics of space and indigenous resistance in
Amazonia lays the ground for our field study in Ecuador.
At the time of our field trip in November 2013, daunting corporate interventions were
at the point of materializing in Shuar territories in the South of Ecuador, where the impending
change preoccupied the minds of the indigenous people. Major new extraction ventures
existed conceptually in the form of corporate plans, communiqués and maps of prospection, to
which the indigenous nations responded with community deliberations, public meetings,
activist interventions and legal steps. The landscape had begun to bear first signs of the
physical incisions characteristic for seismic carbon prospection, the building of access roads
and bridges, and the clearing of forested mountaintops for copper mining – the unmistakable
signs of corporatist interests pushing against forest ecologies. Both the Shuar and the
Sarayaku nations, with whom we met on this trip, are directly affected by the plans.
Relentless pressure is applied on the coherence of their living space and that of hundreds of
species.
With Forest Law, Paulo and I are looking for conceptual and aesthetic tools with
which to engage these ancient multispecies ecologies in Amazonia – Paulo through the
elaboration of archival images, the development of satellite-based cartographies, and a verbal
narrative; myself by making a video essay. Rather than explaining this complex work, the
purpose of this text is to convey how it blends the commitment to political ecology with art,
and to give some insights into the philosophical inspirations that are driving this project. To
begin with, our research trajectory in Ecuador crossed diverse narrative strings that run
together in the forest. We sought the encounter with indigenous activists and lawyers who
conceive of, and struggle for, a legal framework that includes nonhumans, among them, Nina
Pacari, a Kitchwa constitutional justice, who has been crucial in forging the new laws of
nonhuman rights. In the hills between the Andes and the Amazon basin, we interviewed
botanist David Neill at the herbarium of the University of Amazonia who apprehended that
his activity of recording and naming unknown species in the remotest part of the Cordillera
del Condor ultimately leads to the gradual extinction of these very species as a result of
making the areas accessible for vehicles and settlers. In the encounter with Shuar shaman
Julio Tiwiram we learned about his profound pharmaceutical knowledge of the forest. José
Gualingua, leader of the peaceful Sarayaku nation in the depth of the lowland, gave us insight
into their concept of the living forest and its protectors. And finally we entered in dialog with
Ecuadorian anthropologist Eduardo Kohn, who explores in his illuminating book How Forests
Think, how the human has been formed and transformed amid encounters with multiple
species of plants, animals and microorganisms. (Kohn, 2013) In doing so, Kohn expands
philosophical and semiotic frameworks to include other living beings in the list of those
capable of thinking. These far-reaching ideas on how to “think with” sentient environments,
which are profoundly transforming academic disciplines at the present time, have been
cultivated by indigenous forest communities since time immemorial, although their
knowledge and teachings get rarely acknowledged in western bibliographies. The forest as a
space of immense biological and epistemic innovation is the site from where these ideas have
been historically and presently emerging.
In Forest Law, these legal, scientific, semiotic and cosmological narratives converge to form a
dense epistemological fabric of the sylvan ecology that reaches beyond the simple distinction
between personal testimonies and factual evidence. In the design of the Sarayaku satellite
map, also used as evidence in court during the hearings at the Inter-American Court,
indigenous signification of the land and current geological exploitation schemes merge,
exposing the deeply conflicted jurisdiction of the Sarayaku territory. Operating from the
micro- to the macrocosmic scale, Forest Law draws from a range of different human registers
of imagining reality. The artwork comprises a two-channel video installation and photo-text
assemblage, as well as an artist book which expands into a wider and more detailed analysis
of the entanglement between the history of Western commodity-driven intrusions in this part
of Amazonia, the indigenous uprisings in Ecuador, and the international ecological movement
pushing for the rights of nature. What occurs in this corner of the rainforest can only be
understood as the result of these powerful interrelating forces. The project aims at
reintroducing complex landscape histories where the dominant discourse of global capitalism
has continuously effaced them. As mineral and fossil resources are transferred to global
markets and turned into exchangeable commodities, they are systematically cleared from their
social history of labor and displacement as well as their natural history of consumed
landscapes and species extinction. The forceful extraction of raw materials from their local
ecologies is closely linked to how we narrate the stories of commodities and where they come
from. Forest Law undertakes an intervention into these earth narrations by proposing a
radically different cognitive mapping of situated materiality where water, forests, indigenous
communities, landscapes, climates, and the geopolitics of oil and copper are inseparably
entangled in meaningful ways.
While the overall scope of this project covers larger grounds, explored in depth in
Tavares’ photo-text contributions, including a good number of newly designed maps, and in
the book, I will mostly discuss here the two-channel Forest Law video, which concentrates on
three major trials in the Amazonian forest of Ecuador. As mention in the beginning, one such
legal case is currently building in Shuar territories in the South of Ecuador near the Peruvian
border, where a giant copper mining project closes in on indigenous lands. An older, very
famous and to this day unresolved case resonates throughout the film as the haunting history
of a large-scale contamination of soils and water caused by Texaco in the Northeast of the
country in the 1970s. At the heart of the video project, however, lies the case of Sarayaku, a
Kitchwa people who owns a large forest territory that can be entered only through the river or
by flying in with a small propeller plane. The village council decides on each and every
visitor who is allowed to enter. Sarayaku has good reasons to control its boundaries and entry
points since in 2002 a foreign oil company intruded their territory and without consultation
laid a vast grid of lines and explosives for seismic prospection across major parts of their
territory. Sarayaku sued the State of Ecuador at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights
for facilitating oil extraction on their land.
What makes the Sarayaku case so important is that it coincides with significant legal
reforms in Ecuador, enabling a new approach to a scenario that reiterates a long history of
colonial intrusions and expropriations. Emerging from the indigenous cosmologies of the
José Gualinga, leader of the Kitchwa people of Sarayaku, video still from Forest Law
living forest (selva viviente), and fought for by the indigenous nations of Ecuador in defense
of their commonly owned land and way of life, a new Constitution was signed in 2008. The
new legal framework introduces a series of Rights of Nature, which contends that
ecosystems—the living forests, mountains, rivers, and seas—are legal subjects (Biemann &
Tavares 2014). This cosmovision of interdependent cohabitation is deeply inscribed in the
indigenous ethical and legal system in which the violation of natural communities equals the
violation of human rights.
After a decade of struggle and legal dispute Sarayaku finally won the case and
witnessed what they hadn’t realistically hoped for: An official apology by the State of
Ecuador. In October 2014, a ministerial delegation and the Attorney General traveled to the
Amazon to formally apologize for the abuses that took place during the operations carried out
by the oil company in their territory. The public apology was part of the Court’s ruling in
2012, which condemned the Ecuadorian State for violating the rights to communal property.
This verdict confirmed that when traditional lands are involved, the right to property has
become the Court’s standard ruling on indigenous rights. Yet property is not a concept
indigenous nations live by. Legal scholars argue that the right to property cannot serve as the
conceptual stronghold for indigenous peoples’ survival, because domestic and international
law grants states wide leeway to interfere with property. The claim for resources as a national
strategic interest would suffice. Ecuador’s constitution recognizes nature as a juridical
subject, but de facto, nature’s rights are respected and enforced only as far as they don’t stand
in conflict with state economic interests. As it stands, for indigenous communities, the
security offered by the national legal framework remains precarious. Thus, international
lawyers recommend the application of a broad right-to-life concept, known as vida digna,
which would situate such rulings more firmly in the regimes of international human rights.
The legal concepts of property rights, human rights, and nature rights epitomize three
very different conceptions of the underlying human-earth relationship and each ruling enables
a particular vision for how to shape this vital relationship in the future. For Forest Law, a
project particularly interested in practices that extend beyond a human-centric perspective, the
Sarayaku trial is groundbreaking in that it evolves at the intersection of Human Rights and the
Rights of Nature as two profoundly entangled realms. Forest Law also sees the legal cases
unfolding in the Amazon, first and foremost, as an opportunity to consider the legal potential
of a comprehensive Earth jurisprudence that lies beyond property rights and human-centric
laws. The speculations embrace a sort of multispecies world citizenship. At present, nature,
and hence life forms and their ecologies, are treated by the world legal system as mere
property to be traded, consumed, and at best, protected by environmental laws imposing
regulations on corporate and private actors. While we have parceled off the land into small
cells that can be owned and exploited, entire living systems of the Earth are legally invisible.
Since the early beginnings, our legal architecture rests entirely on social contracts made
between humans. What is sorely missing, as French philosopher Michel Serres elucidates in
his visionary book The Natural Contract in the early 1990s – a constant companion during our
field trip – is a pact between humans and nature (Serres 1995). Today, the recognition of
natural communities bearing equal rights of existence is only just rising over the legal
horizon.
The video, based in interviews with indigenous community leaders recounting the
foreign intrusions and forest trials, is shot with two cameras and staged in the middle of the
forest. The stillness of this aesthetic framing sets the piece apart from a documentary film.
Placing the testimonies in the context of anthropogenic Amazonia and climate change, a
video subtext establishes the direct connection between our current universal legal structure
based entirely on property rights, and the massive forest destruction and species extinction.
Zooming out of the dark misty rain forest, the video prologue evokes the Earth as a living
planet whose surface has evolved into ecosystems that keep her metabolism live. With a 4°
rise of temperature, the Amazon ecosystem would turn into dry scrub, an essential cooling
system would then be shut down, and the planet would turn increasingly hot and dry with
ever shrinking land left for human food production. Conclusion: when the forest is gone,
world civilization will have come to an end (Lovelock 2007). Inserted between the interview
flow, the subtext continues throughout the film, positing the Sarayaku case at the decisive
moment, when the concept of nature as a background to be engineered and managed
disappeared and a legal system of Earth jurisprudence emerged that treats all life forms as
rights-bearing entities.
Forensic performance of toxic soil examination, video still from Forest Law.
Rather than a pessimistic prediction, this narrative construction suggests that what
unfolds in this remote corner of the rainforest is of worldly importance. What moves to the
foreground of our artistic and intellectual attention now are the most material concerns. The
toxic drilling mud, for instance, that Texaco spilled out and that remains a jarring presence in
the equatorial forest thirty years later, comes under forensic scrutiny of Forest Law. No longer
the passive backdrop to human history, the landscape, nature, and matter itself turns to the
fore and becomes the subject of aesthetic consideration. Here, the act of soil sampling is
carried out as a mute performance of handling the samplers, shovels and giant pipettes of the
eco-chemists. The activist is enacting a scientific gesture, not in search for data, this time, not
a useful gesture, but one that enables matter to become expressive and deranging, acutely
intensifying the provocation posed by the misplaced oily mud. The evidence brought to the
surface speaks of the perishing of life worlds with whom the law has no relationship, and of
an active materiality with which we want to reconnect.
Forest pharmacy commented by Shuar shaman Julio Tiwiram, video still of Forest Law
For the indigenous communities, these vital ecologies are inhabited and energized by
the masters of the forest, the mountain, and the water – the Amasanga, the Sacha Runa, the Ja
Xingu – with whom they commune and who recharge their life energy. Alluding to the
perspectivism inherent in the relationship Amerindians across Amazonia entertain with other
beings, the two synchronized videos, in their stereo optic of a simultaneous wide-angle and
close-up, expose a composed landscape populated by all kinds of sentient beings who inhabit
different dimensions of reality, minute copper deposits, forest spirits, indigenous councils,
scientists, medicinal plants, international law, global oil corporations, river systems. By
addressing this complex ecology of practices, Forest Law delves into cosmo-political
considerations, the politics of humans and of everything else. The shift from worldly to
cosmic politics, i.e. from global social and political struggles to the earthly and atmospheric
forces of nature, raises the question of how do law, ecology and cosmology conceive of the
global, the cosmos, of something common to go by? How do they conceptualize interaction
between species and with everything else? But also, and I speak mostly for myself, how can
our modest aesthetic practice engage this kind of scale, what can it possibly say about the
different conceptions of how we imagine the world to be composed? If realism has made us
see that reality is something that needs to be built, rather than something already there, we
must assume that the common world too needs to be made, not just represented. Neither a
utopia nor a simple projection into the future, this constructive realist endeavour links local
realities not only with a global context but with the Earth system at large in a cosmopolitical
motivation to build a common sphere.
I’m with Isabelle Stengers and Bruno Latour here who assert that this cosmos, this
common world, is not already existing but in need of being fabricated. If cohabitation, if
‘living with‘ is the goal, Stengers suggests that the future articulation, i.e. the linking of the
multiple divergent worlds, can only happen through a slow epistemology of perplexity,
wondering, and vulnerability (Latour 2004; Stengers 2005). Her slow cosmos is full of spaces
of hesitations where what is common can be examined and redefined. In her words, it is “a
matter of imbuing political voices with the feeling that they do not master the situation they
discuss, that the political arena is peopled with shadows of that which does not have a
political voice, cannot have or does not want to have one”. If cosmos is to endure, it has to
resist the fast consensual way. Her proposal then, is not a manual for good and efficient
cosmosforming, it is an invitation to decelerate, respect speechlessness and give those more
weight who do not function within the parameters of language, reason, and cost effective
productivity. In other words, it allows for variable temporalities. Open-plan fieldwork,
travelling through the forest, engaging in conversations in semi-comprehensible translations,
entering the thicket and digging in the earth to collect samples, all these are ways of slowing
down the pace of knowing and instead let the imponderables come forth and make themselves
known to us in their multiple guise. It is a practice through which to form a different
commons, a different cosmos.
The video narration is set in the future, looking back at the year 2014 when major
decisions about the remaining parts of the forest are being discussed in court. In doing so,
Forest Law posits itself in a conditional future that is shaped by the decisions we are making
now. This time-based process of worldmaking resonates with evolution, in which life forms,
by continuously interpreting and responding to the world around them, turn into an
embodied guess of what the future holds. Living beings don’t exist firmly in the present, the
according to Eduardo Kohn, it is not just the past that comes to affect the present, the
futures, too, bear on the present.
Forest Law, by speculating about visionary legal concepts, holds open a space for
futurities. It holds it open for Sarayaku, the Shuar, and all those visible and invisible beings
who populate the forest. The complex forest ecology is a form of present and future-
generating existence, it is a place where long evolutionary assemblages meet the future legal
system for the earth, embracing exceedingly slow processes that require great attunement of
our senses. If anything, art is able to dynamize and sensitize our ability to experience that
which is taking place and that which is not there yet.
List of references
Kohn, E., How Forests Think, University of California Press, 2013
Biemann U. & Tavares P., Forest Law – Selva juridical, Broad Art Museum, Michigan State
University, 2014. See the chapters The Forest in Court and Rights of Nature.
Lovelock J., The Revenge of Gaia – Earth’s Climate Crisis & The Fate of Humanity, Basic Books,
2007
Serres M., The Natural Contract, University of Michigan Press, 1995.
Latour B. Whose Cosmos, Which Cosmopolitics? Common Knowledge Volume 10, Issue 3, Fall 2004
Stengers I., The Cosmopolitical Proposal, in Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, eds.
Latour B. & Weibel P. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005.
