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‘listening to zea maize’ from mid west radical culture corridor website

ANDANDAND made the following announcement through the dOCUMENTA (13) newsletter (who, it should be noted, added “dOCUMENTA (13) is not responsible for the views or factual claims expressed by the artists and artworks it presents.”.

“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

Midwest Radical Culture Corridor has undertaken a number of drifts with the likes of Temporary Services and Brian Holmes.  Their Call to Farms project and publication is inspirational.

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It has been established by Chris Fremantle, producer and research associate with On The Edge Research, Gray’s School of Art, The Robert Gordon University. Fremantle is a member of a number of international networks of artists, curators and others focused on art and ecology.
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