Agenda

The Tears of Justice: Contemporary Art and Environmental Violence
22 September 2025, 5PM CEST
Aula Baratto

This presentation explores how contemporary artistic practices interrogate and reimagine the meaning of justice, treating it not as a fixed legal or political principle but as a speculative, affective, and aesthetic terrain. Beginning with Claudia Rankine’s assertion that “there is no justice... there’s ‘just us’,” the analysis considers how art grapples with the gap between abstract ideals and lived realities. Through three case studies—jackie sumell’s Solitary Garden, Forensic Architecture’s Environmental Racism in Death Alley, and Vivien Sansour’s Heirloom Seed Library and Traveling Kitchen—the talk, based on my current book in progress, examines how social, environmental, and climate justice are embodied, enacted, and imagined through creative forms. These works generate spaces for public reflection, historical reckoning, and collective resistance, offering not solutions but felt, situated, and often fragile practices of solidarity and survival. In doing so, they invite a rethinking of justice as an ongoing process rooted in memory, embodiment, and the refusal to disappear.

T.J. Demos
Professor, History of Art and Visual Culture, University of California, Santa Cruz
Director, Center for Creative Ecologies