Testimonies from a Mourning Planet: Art, Representation and Justice Beyond the Human in Latin America

The following post serves as an introduction to a project developed by the author as a Visiting Fellow at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. This project brings together the work of scholars, artists, and activists attending to other-than-human forms of suffering and testimony-making in Latin America to shed new light on theories of multispecies and planetary justice. Future instalments will include episodes of a forthcoming podcast, available through the Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies' website.

1.    Planetary Justice and the Rights of Nature

On March 29, 2024, an unusual experiment in planetary communication took place. Members of Colombia’s transitional justice tribunal, the JEP, visited La Balsa to notify the Cauca River that it had been accredited as a victim of the armed conflict. With its high humidity, this hamlet in southwest Colombia is an open field of wetness; lush vegetation—leafy trees, towering palms, overflowing shrubs—thrives baroquely. It is as if the river unfolds through the atmosphere —setting the mood, tone, timbre. Under a large tent, representatives of different state agencies, in their neatly pressed shirts, sang along to the national anthem. Just a few steps away, the river meandered —swollen, pulsing, electric. The audience, locals in vibrant dresses and traditional attire, were eager for these formalities to come to an end—waiting to assert their right to speak. They were here to celebrate. For more than three decades, and at great risk, afro-Colombian and Indigenous communities in this corner of Colombia had protested against the horrors inflicted upon the river: mercury contamination from illegal mining, chemical dumping from illicit production, and, most tragically, its use as a mass grave. They had voiced the river’s plight, denouncing what decades of violence had done to waters, peoples, and territories.

As one of the country’s main waterways, the Cauca has borne witness to countless tragedies. The event began with cantos led by the community’s mayoras (local matriarchs), their voices tides of sorrow and anger—the river followed with its torrid hissing, the overcast sky echoed their grief. Auto 226 of 2023, issued by the JEP, claimed that between 2000 and 2004, the Cauca had been systematically used to conceal war crimes. At La Balsa, armed groups had set up a permanent checkpoint where they executed their victims on the riverbank and disappeared the bodies in the Cauca’s waters, never to be found (Molano-Bravo, 2017, 110-111). The transformation of the river into a burial ground deeply severed the spiritual connection between ethnic communities and their territory. In Buenos Aires, the predominantly Black municipality where La Balsa is located, over 20% of the population is registered in the national victims' registry (RUV). War shattered their universe. As community leader Héctor Marino Carabali shared that day, war had brought about "a situation of dis-harmony" with the river.

What does it mean for the State to acknowledge a river as a victim of an armed conflict? What are the implications of such a decision? How does it amplify –or silence— calls for moral recognition and reparation in instances of dire ecosocial violence? In what capacity does it support transitioning to a world without extractivism, destructive agriculture, and violence against local communities? Questions such as these are being explored –and experimented with– in legal thought and practice worldwide. While legal advocacy for the environment is long-standing, recent developments in rights of nature (RoN) jurisprudence are radically changing the State’s relationship with the natural world by moving from human-centered environmental protection to granting legal personhood to more-than-human beings. As of August 30, 2024, the Eco Jurisprudence Monitor reports 534 initiatives globally that aim at granting rights to nature. Latin America, with the highest number of approved RoN initiatives—from Colombia’s recent law declaring the Ranchería River a subject of rights (August 8, 2024) to Ecuador’s historical 2008 constitutional recognition of Pachamama as a legal person—leads the movement.

Recognizing the rights of nature has become a powerful mechanism for enacting environmental protection laws that afford ecosocial worlds to exist, flourish, and regenerate beyond market-driven logic. It has also become a crucial tactic for contesting the human-centered narcissism entrenched in the State's legal and institutional structures. Nature has long been viewed as property in Western legal systems, a resource for human exploitation. In Roman law, for instance, humans were considered personae (persons), meaning they had legal personhood and could possess rights and duties, while nature was considered res (things), subject to ownership and use—a legal distinction adopted by both modern civil and common law. Current discussions in the social and natural sciences have begun to challenge this long-standing bifurcation that underpins modern legal systems, pushing for new conceptualizations of (more-than-)human agency, representation, and justice. This rethinking has become especially urgent in the Anthropocene, as capitalism’s exploitation of the Earth's life systems threatens the survival of all on Earth. Rooted in an understanding of the interconnectedness of lifeforms, proponents of nature's rights seek legal protection for earth beings —such as plants, animals, mountains, rivers, or ecosystems— whose existences are deeply entwined with our social worlds, as essential to human survival and the advancement of human rights. They also call for recognizing the intrinsic value of these other-than-human beings, insisting that our moral duty is to respect their right to exist rather than uphold a human-centered hierarchy that relies on devaluing other forms of life (Rodríguez-Garavito, 2024)

2.    Contradictions, Barriers, and Systemic Challenges in Environmental Governance

While the RoN movement has achieved important symbolic and legal victories, its practical effectiveness remains limited. In 2019, five years before being accredited as a victim by JEP, the Superior Court of Medellín recognized the Cauca River as a legal person with rights to protection, conservation, maintenance, and restoration. At the time, the ruling responded to the impacts of the Hidroituango mega-dam, along with illegal mining and logging activities, which affected the river from its source to its confluence with the Magdalena River. In an effort to halt ongoing environmental damage, the court also declared its decision inter communis, extending to "all individuals and communities tied to the Cauca River, its tributaries, and nearby areas" (Tribunal Superior de Medellín, Sentencia de tutela No. 38, June 17, 2019). Doing so, the court expanded what a river is to the State, recognizing it not only as a body of water but as an ecology that includes its basin and more-than-human inhabitants. However, as of July 2024, the court’s decision remains largely unimplemented. Social organizations and local leaders have condemned the lack of institutional action. Obstacles include difficulties forming a supervisory body, poor coordination among public entities, an unclear budget, and the absence of punitive measures to enforce compliance. Additionally, the current protection plan focuses solely on the area affected by the now operational dam, while other problems, such as illegal logging, remain unaddressed. Mercury discharges, central concerns of the ruling, have only escalated.

In a world of connections and interdependencies, how do earth beings voice their concerns? What happens when these voices become entangled in –if not captured by– legal and institutional systems? Through what practices are their presences and absences, utterances and silences, porosities and boundaries, being defined? In many jurisdictions, RoN initiatives are at odds with property rights and economic interests, often prioritized by institutions meant to protect nature. As in the case of Cauca, the stringent protection of property and wealth in most contemporary legal systems hinders implementation. When the Yarra River in Victoria, Australia, was recognized as a legal entity in 2017, it represented progress for environmental governance at a local level. However, this recognition has led to conflicts with established water governance systems. Without a coherent regulatory framework, State institutions are left to balance economic interests and environmental protection around critical issues such as urban growth and agricultural water rights. The Lake Erie Bill of Rights, a landmark measure in the U.S. legal system passed by Ohio voters in 2019 to protect the lake from pollution, was quickly challenged in court by agricultural and industrial interests claiming it violated property rights, leading to its being declared unconstitutional.

Moreover, while RoN initiatives may signal promising changes in how governments view agency and responsibility in instances of ecological harm, it also risks providing the State with symbolic cover to engage in violent extractivist practices (Anderson, 2024). Addressing the incorporation of Indigenous concepts such as 'Pachamama' or 'buen vivir' into Andean constitutions, Macarena Gómez-Barris (2017, 5) argues that these more-than-human cosmologies, central to Latin American RoN frameworks, have 'become the institutional reduction of Indigenous knowledge formations' under State management, masking its reliance on harmful resource extraction to finance social programs. This argument sheds light on the conflicting logic within the Bolivian state's current position, which advocates for protecting nature while promoting land clearing and deforestation, pushing the agricultural frontier deeper into the Amazon at the expense of Indigenous territories. A similar contradiction could arise if Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa enforces a potential moratorium on the popular referendum to halt future oil drilling in Yasuní National Park, in the eastern Amazon, citing Ecuador’s reliance on oil revenue for economic growth and debt repayment.

3.    Artistic Experiments as Ecological Conversations

Just as the line differentiating a river's waters and banks is elusive and often contested, so are the boundaries between nature's voice and those who claim to speak on its behalf. After the official speeches had been delivered at La Balsa, the community ceremony began. Attendees lined up to wash their hands in the river, honoring and reconnecting with the Cauca, before being invited into canoes to pay tribute to the river. As they drifted on the brown, earthy waters, community members and State representatives alike offered flowers, seeds, herbs, and prayers to the river, acknowledging past harm and inviting the restoration of socioecological harmony. JEP members also collected river water and sand from the shore to bring back to the capital as a memorial. When they returned to the riverbanks, attendants were met with a final performance: the amplified voice of the river, projected through speakers connected to microphones placed along the banks. The once-silent atmosphere buzzed with the vibrancies of a lively, moving river weaving all together in a shared cadence—gurgling currents, murmurs, rustling palms, a child’s laughter, the echoes of prayers.

To bring RoN jurisprudence to fruition, activists, thinkers, and legal practitioners are creatively reimagining nature’s legal standing in court and office (Anderson, 2024; Rodríguez-Garavito, 2024). As evidence worldwide shows, environmental representation –usually carried out by politicians, technicians, and lawyers– is recurrently captured by the pathological logics and practices of dominant institutions, hindering the effective execution of RoN jurisprudence (Tanasescu, 2022). Changing how we value nature demands more than granting legal personhood to other-than-human beings; it also requires a radical transformation in how legal systems approach voice and expression, the two pillars defining human capability. This would also require a shift in how other-than-human beings are heard, accounted for, and represented in legal proceedings. In modern law and governance, representation operates within a principal-agent framework, where representatives speak for those who cannot present their interests, lack a voice, or are excluded from legal or political processes. While well-established and proven effective in tort law, this model is fundamentally rooted in human-centered perspectives that prioritize vocalization, semantic clarity, and technical precision, often sidelining the complexities and diversity inherent in ecological systems. Even participatory and deliberative approaches to environmental representation —such as those at the Whanganui River in New Zealand, the Ganges and Yamuna Rivers in India, or the Atrato River in Colombia—risk reducing nature to something that needs human guardianship, voicing and interpretation, potentially perpetuating its instrumentalization or enclosure in anthropocentric paradigms of representation. A voice is sound but also a register through which meaning is brought forth: expression and articulation. Examining, experimenting, and speculating how other-than-human beings express and articulate their values, interests, and desires—even when multiplicity and contradiction emerge—is critical to advancing eco-political interventions through legal practice.

While some may consider this a conceptual stretch, ecological articulation—both as a manner of uttering and a form of being together—has long been a central concern in environmental ethics, philosophy of science, and, most importantly, the political struggles of native and local communities for their survival. This vital impulse has also been explored by Latin American artists, many inspired by the more-than-human turn in the arts and humanities, whose practice sparks serious questions around personhood, authorship, and expression. Common threads in this body of work are claims that matter is alive and acts according to its own trajectories, inclinations, and tendencies; that all beings share a world and have ways of communicating in and with it; and that art, science, and spirituality—or even legal thought—are part of an ongoing conversation on what is alive and it means to be alive. Unlike decision-making processes, which demand constant negotiation to come to terms with that which is mattering, practices of contemporary artists such as Ursula Biemann, Paulo Tavares, Leonel Vásquez, and Elizabeth Gallon Droste open up space to experiment with different forms of engagement—how bodies find and affect one another. Art does not rely on discursive clarities; it works through sensations and intensities in ways that words cannot capture. Unburdened by the need for "truth-making," artists can become strategic allies to the Rights of Nature movement, as their work affords ways to explore the affective agencies of other-than-human beings, expanding our understanding of how they express their interests and what practices bring them to our collective attention.

Art affords nature’s voices to be attended to in ways that exceed human values and expectations by allowing forms of expression that rigid legal systems often stifle. Cartografías invisibles (2018), by the Argentine duo Robotícula (Ana Laura Cantera and Demian Ferrari), exemplifies this. As such, the piece involves a robot designed to navigate its local environment while carrying fungi that act as its conductor. The robot, equipped with sensors, continuously monitors both the terrain it traverses and the condition of the fungi, moving to optimize its well-being. The fungi, looking for a healthier environment, communicate and influence the machine's behavior, directing it to explore the countryside for better conditions. In several ways, Cartografías invisibles reimagines articulation, desire, and expression, enabling other-than-human beings to signal what well-being means to them and, perhaps—if we may speculate—express their intentions as members of the multi-being community.

Topografía Alterada II (2015), by Uruguayan artist Alejandra González Soca, similarly sheds light on the expressive faculties of other-than-human beings. In this case, the artwork questions the linguistic boundaries we use to categorize and differentiate other-than-human entities – "fungi," "animal," "plant." Topografía Alterada II is an installation that turns the exhibition space into a living territory, built with layers of organic soil, discarded wedding dresses, geotextile fiber, spores, and seeds. The textures and materials, without conforming to any specific pattern, weave a world of their own. Through a life cycle sustained by the viewer's watering and care, this world is constantly changing. What needs and care mean here, however, corresponds to how the audience engages with the proliferation of forms and meanings that occur in the artwork. To the caring eye, expression can be found in a trace, a line, a gesture –what Eduardo Khon (2013, 157) describes as the worldly processes of pattern production and propagation that enable interactions between living beings. In this capacity, Topografía Alterada II affords an emergent bio-semiotics where the viewer becomes response-able to the ongoing transformation of the lifeforms articulating throughout the installation.

4.    Polyphonic Expression: Beyond Human-Centered Rights

In the 2008 National Salon in Cali, Colombian artist María Elvira Escallón brought the Cauca River into the exhibition space. For Escallón, the Cauca was a source of joy and fulfillment during her childhood. The idea behind the piece came from a desire to bring her beloved river into a public setting while also drawing attention to the passage of time. Grounded in a long-standing artistic conversation that honors the words, marks, and inscriptions left by those lost to political repression, Precipitación de Arenas del Río Cauca (2008) shed light on traces of a river that has undergone profound change. The installation consisted of sand from the Cauca dripping from the ceiling and accumulating in a once-occupied waiting room. Sand fell slowly, like a ticking clock, as viewers listened to a dried-up river's faint but steady hiss. However, as days passed, the sand formed a thick layer throughout the room, drawing viewers' attention to the heavy sediments accumulated on the Cauca— political, economic, environmental.

I wonder how the river's voice, faintly heard in Escallón’s installation, might resonate with the sounds amplified by the microphones set up to capture the Cauca at the banks of La Balsa. I’m also curious how both acts of expression utter different rivers, revealing them to be more than just a flowing body of water but a living ecology shaped by various expressions of life that inhabit, define, and sustain it. As in the works of Robotícula and González Soca, these enactments of the Cauca reveal that the articulation of desires or concerns by other-than-human forces is neither incomprehensible to humans nor a solitary act of sovereign expression. Instead, it is a multivocal, polyphonic, open field—an atmosphere—invoking nature's inherent capacity to express itself in multiple ways—even when it occurs in controlled settings.

In these trying times, humans have the responsibility of not only protecting nature but also attending to its many modes of articulating, expressing, testifying. These efforts must go hand in hand. To firmly implement nature's rights, then, we must redefine how courts and offices approach voice and representation in ways that resonate with the semiotic, social, and political capacities of other-than-human beings. Rather than relying on conceptual models that prioritize symbolic equivalence and syntactic clarity, art practices that engage with more-than-human entities can afford opportunities to experiment with how earth beings express themselves in contexts of environmental harm, restoration, or collective flourishing. By installing open microphones along the Cauca River I would like to think the JEP representatives were, in effect, engaging in an aesthetic experiment—much like that proposed by the Colombian Truth Commission, which incorporated the voices of trees and birds into their final report. Cauca’s testimony was heard and documented as an actualization of an ecological process that demanded acknowledgment. Maybe unintentionally, JEP opened a path to attending to rivers —but also mountains, lakes, ecologies– as polyvalent, agentic forces that exceed the limits of any single form of representation—be it liberal constitutionalism, modern science, or Indigenous knowledge systems. In the atmospheric gathering of humans, birds, rocks, and waters, a polyphonic legal person emerged, where each voice remained distinct, unable to be merged, interrupted, interpreted through, or overtaken by the others; they simply shared legal standing. It is within this unresolved, ongoing ontological tension that I believe a biocentric RoN framework can be realized.

References:
Anderson, Mark. The Rights of Nature and the Testimony of Things: Literature and Environmental Ethics from Latin America. Vanderbilt University Press, 2024.
Gómez-Barris, Macarena. The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives. Duke University Press, 2017. 
Kohn, Eduardo. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. University of California Press, 2013.
Molano-Bravo, Alfredo. “Suárez.” in De río en río: Vistazo a los territorios negros, Aguilar, 2017, pp. 83–122.
Rodríguez-Garavito, César. More Than Human Rights. NYU MOTH Project, 2024.
Tanasescu, Mihnea. Understanding the rights of nature: A critical introduction. transcript Verlag, 2022.

Author
Alejandro Ponce de León. Colombian editor and researcher working at the intersection of environmental humanities and technoscience studies. He is the founder and co-editor of the Latin American Platform for Environmental Humanities, a collective that fosters dialogues on environmental thought across the Americas. His work has been published in Cultural Studies, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Humanidades: Revista de la Universidad de Montevideo, Revista Tabula Rasa, Revista Endémico, Diffractions, Tapuya, Sociological Forum, among others.

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The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent the position of CLACS, ILCS or the School of Advanced Study, University of London.