This masterclass will be held in-person at the Asser Instituut.
The art and international law laboratory: experiences of justice
In the Masterclass, we invite you to explore the potential of art to identify and overcome legal, ethical, and social challenges in international legal practice. Four artists from various disciplines will offer a fresh and inspiring perspective on safeguarding the dignity, safety and well-being of participants in legal processes, in particular international trials. We will discuss how insights from the arts can help to strike a balance between strict procedural requirements, technical language and privacy concerns on the one hand and a need for empathy, empowerment and the expression of emotion on the other. The aim is to discover how we can use artistic tools to improve the experiences of justice in international legal spaces by people from diverse backgrounds and privileges.
The Masterclass programme consists of two lectures and three workshops. The lectures by Lua Vollaard (curator at Stroom The Hague) and Dr. Sofia Stolk (Asser) will provide an overview of contemporary work done in the fields of international law and art, visual anthropology, and legal design. In three workshops, you will experiment with artistic methods of design, dialogue, and visualization to expand your legal toolbox.
Workshops
In the first workshop, Eliane Bots will discuss her project on the interpreters from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in the Hague and their position as a channel between speakers and listeners, witnesses and defendants, judges and attendees.
How have the interpreters been influenced by their work for the tribunal and the narratives they interpreted? How did they balance emotions and neutrality in their work? What are the lessons learned for their colleagues at other international criminal tribunals? And how to work on these questions in a film? Eliane Bots is joined by former ICTY interpreters Alma Imamović, Besmir Fidahić (online) and Nenad Popović Pops. Besmir Fidahić is also an author of the book "Linguistic justice at the ICTY" on working mechanisms behind language work at this institution.
In the second workshop, Meenakshi Thirukode will be initiating a restorative circle that invites participants to think from a place of their own value systems and their legal practice. It involves a process of collective consciousness raising and holding space for oneself and each other. The workshop is a way to consider broader political narratives around ethics, values, truths through a micro-political lens using tools such as active listening. Particularly, she will speak to case studies on anonymous whistleblowing in relation to #metoo.
In the third workshop, a team from the NuLawLab in Boston will facilitate a workshop that explores how survivors of grave human rights violations might be empowered to overcome legal and extra-legal challenges when participating in international trials. Participants will be introduced to the field of legal design and will work together to develop creative strategies of legal empowerment and visual literacy.
Provisional Programme
Thursday 21 October 2021
09:00 - 09:30 Welcome and introductions
09:30 - 10:30 Introduction in Art and International Law
Dr Sofia Stolk (Asser Institute)
10:30 - 10:45 Coffee break
10:45 - 12:15 Lecture ‘Artistic strategies to reveal, respond, and reflect on the City of Peace & Justice’
Lua Vollaard (curator at Stroom, The Hague, The Netherlands)
12:15 - 13:15 Lunch break
13:15 - 17:00 WORKSHOP 1:
International criminal law, interpretation, emotion and aesthetics in film
Eliane Esther Bots (artist and filmmaker)
Friday 22 October 2021
09:00 - 09:30 Welcome and reflections on previous day
09:30 - 12:30 WORKSHOP 2:
Instituting Otherwise – feminist consciousness raising on experiences of justice
Meenakshi Thirukode (writer, organiser, researcher))
12:30 - 14:00 Lunch break
14:00 - 17:00 WORKSHOP 3:
Legal Design – empowering survivors participating in international trials
Jules Sievert Rochielle, Miso Kim, Mariana Costas, Sankalp Bhatnagar (NuLawLab, Boston, USA)
Speakers
Lua Vollaard is a curator and writer with a background in human rights research and image theory. Since 2018, she has been a curator at Stroom Den Haag. Recent projects span across various fields of inquiry; the exhibitions Hybrid Peace (2019) by the Visual Culture Research Center, Towards a Black Testimony (2019) by Languid Hands, rite of access by left gallery (2019), Nøtel (The Hague) (2018) by Lawrence Lek, and her work as a researcher on the Forensic Architecture projects A Killing in Umm-al Hiran and Ground Truths (both 2017) all challenge the representation of justice in late liberalist societies.
Eliane Esther Bots is a Dutch award-winning artist and filmmaker. She graduated University of the Arts Utrecht (NL) in 2008. She participated in the post-graduate program ‘Document and contemporary art’ at École Européenne Supérieure de l’image (FR) in 2012. In 2016 she graduated cum laude the Master of Film at the Film Academy in Amsterdam (NL). Her films have been screened and exhibited at (inter)national festivals such as ‘Berlinale’, ‘New York Film Festival’ (USA) and ‘International short film festival Curta Cinema’, Rio de Janeiro (BR). She has been programming for the Go Short Film festival, Nijmegen (NL), curating for the Master of Film at the Film Academy in Amsterdam (NL) and works currently as a lecturer ‘Moving image’ at the University of the Arts in Utrecht (NL).
Meenakshi Thirukode is a writer, researcher, educator and curator based in Delhi. She runs ‘School of IO', which is a space of unlearning, dedicated to navigating ‘study', as a radical feminist tool of political agency. She has actively participated in the #metoo movement within the art world and has been working towards creating conversations, workshops and gatherings in a 'post-metoo' landscape in order to work towards manifesting systems of accountability, in collaboration with other allies. Her recent projects include 'Disorganizing Metabolisms' in collaboration with 'FAR (Food, Art, Research) Network' and Marrickville School of Economics, the ‘Here, There and Everywhere' conference at MAC Birmingham, UK as part of the India-UK 70 years celebration (March 2018) and ‘Out of Turn, Being Together Otherwise', exploring performance art histories in collaboration with Asia Art Archive (AAA) at Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa, India (December 15th-22nd 2018).
Jules Sievert Rochielle is an artist, a legal educator, a community arts educator and a social justice advocate. Jules is the Creative Director of the NuLawLab at Northeastern University School of Law, and their focus is centered on transforming law and the way people interact with the law through creative and cultural approaches. At Nulawlab, our programs, projects, seminars, and research allow us to build cross-disciplinary teams and community-based partnerships focused on transforming legal education, the legal profession, and the delivery of legal services. We do this work at the leading public interest law school to provide our students with the knowledge and skills to be the legal inventors of the future.
Dr. Miso Kim is Design Director at NuLawLab. Miso is an assistant professor of Experience Design in the Department of Arts + Design at Northeastern University. She holds a PhD in Design, an MDes in Interaction Design, and an MDes in Communication Planning and Information Design from the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University. She also holds a BS in Architecture from Sungkyunkwan University in Korea.
Sankalp Bhatnagar isSenior Researcher in Critical Design at NuLawLab. Sankalp holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in mathematics and design from Carnegie Mellon, where he earned intercollege and research honors, and a graduate degree from The New School. He is currently at MIT doing graduate coursework affiliated with science, technology, and society, and gained his first exposure with legal design through a seminar on law, justice, and design at Harvard Law School.
Mariana Costa Oliveira Morais is Legal Designer in Residence at NuLawLab. Mariana is a Law School student from University of São Paulo and co-founder of USP Legal Design Lab, the first university legal design lab from Brazil. She studied chinese language and culture in University of Hubei in 2017 and now is currently working as a legal designer and research assistant in the area of Economic Law. Her interest fields of researches are Human Rights, Urban Law and Public Policies.
The coordinator
Dr Sofia Stolk is a researcher at the Asser Institute and the coordinator of the Camera Justitia programme at the Movies that Matter Foundation. Her current research project, entitled ‘Justice needs to be seen to be done: The International Legal Landscape in a Visual Age’, studies the use of visual means within international courts and tribunals and the proliferation of images about international law. She has widely published about the intersection of art, architecture, culture and international law. Sofia is experienced in organising lectures and events on these themes in cooperation with law schools, cultural institutions and independent artists.
Certificate
After the successful completion of this Masterclass, you will receive a professional certificate from the T.M.C. Asser Instituut.
Terms and conditions
Read the terms and conditions for the masterclass series.
T.M.C. Asser Instituut - lifelong learning opportunities for professionals and academics globally
Coronavirus policy
The Asser Institute follows the official guidelines of the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) and the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The format of our events may be subject to change. Please check our website and social media platforms for updates. You can also sign up to our Educations & Events mailing list to be informed about COVID-19 updates.
