NATURAL CONTRACT LAB

PROJECT

NATURAL CONTRACT LAB

How can artistic practices reclaim an ecology of repair, and creatively design protocols with a regenerative approach to the loss of landscapes? Do we need other ways of justice, environmental laws and reparative actions? What kind of artistic processes do we need as a gesture of care for the planetary? How are transdisciplinary alliances a response to ecocide?Natural contract Lab is a new service of the Kinstitute, an ongoing (2020), utopian public service for multispecies justice, based on long-term projects dedicated to climate justice, environmental crimes, ecocide and the possibilities of making justice through artistic, juridical, ritualistic and restorative justice practices.

Together we form the BODY OF REPAIR: Maria Lucia Cruz Correia (artist, the initiator of the project), Marine Calmet (environmental law), Prof. Brunilda Pali (restorative Justice), Evanne Nowak (climate grief), Lode Vranken (architecture), Vinny Jones (light sciences), Dave Balle (soil ecology/fertility), Mathias Velle ( outside eye/dramaturg), Mark Pozlep (artist, videographer). Together we focus on finding common tools and strategies to recover, mitigate and restore.

We form the LAB for the research of Sacrifice zones. And we propose a site-responsive artistic intervention on location, that will be in the format of workshops on rights of nature, climate grief and earth contracts. For each study case, we will develop a protocol for the community, both human and more than human. We will design a process of restoration on sites that have been affected by environmental crimes or climate change. Our first study case of ecocide will be the Zenne River, a symbolic start in the heart of Europe. As a methodology we will be researching the impact of the killing of this river on an ancestral and cosmological level but also on the health of communities along the river both human and more than human. The dream is to legally recognize the Zenne River as an entity.

Maria Lucia Cruz Correia

Correia's artistic work speaks her deep engagement for ecological crises and climate emergency. She reacts to the environmental crimes of our times by bringing audiences into participatory laboratories that connects the artistic with the voices of scientists, activists and lawyers. Correia’s visual installations, performances and participatory laboratories talks from the idea of
 a complex ecological community, incorporating humans and non-humans, as a reality in which audiences are triggered to connected to a ‘more-than-human-world. Most of her projects are temporary and autonomous platforms proposing utopian and resilient public services as alternatives for the current capitalistic system. Correia's proposes contemporary discourses on the anthropocene, nature colonization and climate emergency and therefore her work is mostly long therm projects as process of radicalization, transformation and restoration. From 2013-19, Correia is an artist in residency in Vooruitkunstcentrum and her work has been supported by Imagine 2020 network. In 2017 she received the Roel Verniers Prijs at the Theaterfestival with her first theater piece Voice of nature: the trial and in 2019 she has been nominated for COAL prize with her new project, Kinstitute.