GeoHumanities

ISSN: 2373-566X (Print) 2373-5678 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rgeo20

The Cosmo-Political Forest: A Theoretical and

Aesthetic Discussion of the Video Forest Law

Ursula Biemann

To cite this article: Ursula Biemann (2015) The Cosmo-Political Forest: A Theoretical
and Aesthetic Discussion of the Video Forest Law, GeoHumanities, 1:1, 157-170, DOI:
10.1080/2373566X.2015.1075359

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/2373566X.2015.1075359

Published online: 11 Sep 2015.

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 PRACTICES AND CURATIONS

The Cosmo-Political Forest: A Theoretical and Aesthetic

Discussion of the Video Forest Law
Ursula Biemann
Zurich, Switzerland

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 forests 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 that 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 colla-
boration with Brazilian architect Paulo Tavares, whose long-term research of the politics of
space and indigenous resistance in Amazonia lays the groundwork 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 extrac-
tion 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
the first signs of the physical incisions characteristic of 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

GeoHumanities, 1(1) 2015, 157–170 © Copyright 2015 by Association of American Geographers.

Initial submission, May 2015; revised submission, July 2015; final acceptance, July 2015.
Published by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
158 BIEMANN
THE COSMO-POLITICAL FOREST 159
160 BIEMANN

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 article 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 encounter with
Indigenous activists and lawyers who conceive of, and struggle for, a legal framework
that includes nonhumans; among them was 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 peace-
ful Sarayaku nation in the depth of the lowland, gave us insight into their concept of the
living forest and its protectors. Finally, we entered into a dialog with Ecuadorian anthro-
pologist Eduardo Kohn, who explored 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 expanded philosophical and
semiotic frameworks to include other living beings on 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 are 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 that 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

Preceding pages: Video still from Forest Law (courtesy of Ursula Biemann). (Color figure available online.)
 THE COSMO-POLITICAL FOREST 161

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 dis-
placement 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 com-
munities, landscapes, climates, and the geopolitics of oil and copper are inseparably
entangled in meaningful ways.
Although the overall scope of this project covers larger ground, explored in depth in
Tavares’s photo–text contributions (including a good number of newly designed maps) and
in the book, I mostly discuss here the two-channel Forest Law video, which concentrates on
three major trials in the Amazonian forest of Ecuador. As mentioned earlier, 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 the large-
scale contamination of soils and water caused by Texaco in northeast Ecuador in the 1970s. At
the heart of the video project, however, lies the case of Sarayaku, a Kitchwa people who own 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 2002, when a
foreign oil company intruded on their territory and without consultation laid a vast grid of
lines and explosives for seismic prospection across major parts of their land. 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
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 contend that ecosystems—
the living forests, mountains, rivers, and seas—are legal subjects (Biemann and 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 had not 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
162 BIEMANN

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 do not 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. Even as 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
has rested entirely on social contracts made between humans. What is sorely missing, as
French philosopher Serres (1995) elucidated in his visionary book The Natural Contract—
a constant companion during our field trip—is a pact between humans and nature. Today,
the recognition of natural communities bearing equal rights of existence is only just rising
over the legal horizon.
The video, based on 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 rainforest, the video prologue evokes
Earth as a living planet whose surface has evolved into ecosystems that keep her metabo-
lism 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 increas-
ingly hot and dry, with ever-shrinking land left for human food production. The conclu-
sion? When the forest is gone, world civilization will have come to an end (Lovelock
 José Gualinga, leader of the Kitchwa people of Sarayaku. Video still from Forest Law (courtesy of Ursula
Biemann). (Color figure available online.)

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.
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 comes 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 of 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.
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
164 BIEMANN

Forensic performance of toxic soil examination. Video still from Forest Law (courtesy of Ursula Biemann).
(Color figure available online.)
THE COSMO-POLITICAL FOREST 165
 Shuar shaman Julio Tiwiram in his forest pharmacy. Video still from Forest Law (courtesy of Ursula Biemann).
(Color figure available online.)

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, and 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 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 endeavor links local realities not only with a global context but with the earth system at
large in a cosmo-political motivation to build a common sphere.
I am 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 vulner-
ability (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
 Shuar shaman Julio Tiwiram in his forest pharmacy. Video still from Forest Law (courtesy of Ursula Biemann).
(Color figure available online.)

have or does not want to have one” (Stengers 2005, 996). If cosmos is to endure, it has to resist
the fast consensual way. Her proposal then, is not a manual for good and efficient cosmos
forming, but 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 field work, traveling through the
forest, engaging in conversations in semicomprehensible 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 letting 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 world making 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 do not exist firmly in the present, thus, according to Kohn (2013), 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.
168 BIEMANN

Installation of Forest Law at Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery, Concordia University, Montreal, 2015 (courtesy
of Ursula Biemann). (Color figure available online.)
THE COSMO-POLITICAL FOREST 169
170 BIEMANN

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I thank Paulo Tavares for his generosity in sharing his broad knowledge with me during the
development of the project, and curator Yesomi Umolu for her support in producing the piece at
the Broad Art Museum, Michigan State University.

REFERENCES

Biemann, U., and P. Tavares. 2014. Forest law—Selva juridical. East Lansing: Michigan State University, Broad
Art Museum.
Kohn, E. 2013. How forests think. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Latour, B. 2004. Whose cosmos, which cosmopolitics? Common Knowledge 10 (3): 450–62.
Lovelock, J. 2007. The revenge of Gaia—Earth’s climate crisis and the fate of humanity. New York: Basic Books.
Serres, M. 1995. The natural contract. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Stengers, I. 2005. The cosmopolitical proposal. In Making things public: Atmospheres of democracy, ed. B. Latour B. and
P. Weibel, 994–1003. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

URSULA BIEMANN is an independent artist, writer, and video essayist based in Zurich, Switzerland. E-mail:
ursula@geobodies.org. Her artistic practice is strongly research oriented and involves field work in remote locations
where she investigates climate change and the ecologies of oil and water.