How can critical spatial practice today make invisible crimes visible? Let me be clear by giving an explicit environmental meaning to this singular question. The invisible or the less visible crimes of environmental violence are those committed against nature and subaltern social groups for the accumulation of capital. In the conflict between the economy and the environment the cost of capitalism is an increasing output of toxic waste. The fact that nature is still cheap is not a sign of abundance but “a result of a given distribution of property rights, power and income”1. The evil twin of the territorial scale displacement of people is the massive displacement of pollution to other nations. As animals mark their territories with stinking urine, humans claim territory by polluting the earth.2 Human species have come to appropriate the earth through pollution.
Historically, in the cases of criminal poisoning, the most decisive element of expert medico-legal knowledge was chemical evidence. This, more than any other method, enabled the toxicologist, to claim with a high degree of probability that a poisoning took place. The ability to provide chemical proof in a case of criminal poisoning was a crucial feature of the toxicologist’s suite of expertise because it thwarted the design of one unique feature of the criminal act, that of concealing the instrument of violence as is insidiously common. Most of all, the power of chemical proof lay in its capacity to ‘demonstrate’ to a legal audience via extracting and demonstrating poison from the body of the victim. The maneuvers of toxicologists to bring poison from ‘invisible’ to ‘visible’ in the body of the victim allowed the law to judge — with enough circumstantial evidence at hand — the accused as guilty or not guilty. Aesthetics was translated into, and transferred over to the conditions for a judgment to emerge.
In forensic presentations of evidence, making the trace of a crime visible is not mere information but is a matter of persuasion. As a presentation to the senses, it is persuasive of judgment. In Western jurisprudence the corpus delicti (the body of the crime) refers to the principle that a crime must be proven to have occurred before a person can be convicted of committing that crime. Invoked in murder investigations, the best evidence for establishing crime is the body of the deceased and the cause of death. In this sense, the term also describes the evidence that proves that a crime has been committed.
This story is from the January - June 2017 edition of TAKE on art.
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This story is from the January - June 2017 edition of TAKE on art.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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why do artists write on art?
once, there were newspaper reviews. they connected art writing to the artist and to an audience, with immediacy.
Complete Love
It’s 2011, late summer. All over Europe, young people are occupying central public squares to demonstrate for more social justice. In Berlin, their agenda is different. The completists gathered at Alexanderplatz aspire for justice primarily on an intimate level. They believe that only when the redistribution of material wealth includes equal chances of finding sex and love — no matter how elderly, disabled, or ugly you are — communism will become real.
Delicate Animals
The humidity is sabotage and my skin is undone. I’ve always had a preference for dryness. While other women fear wrinkles, I never mind the beginnings of a crease. They seem cleaner, those intersecting lines. But then I’ve never been afraid of getting older, of being an abstraction.
Falling In Love (Again): India's Weaves Story
India’s love affair with handwoven cloth shows no signs of abating. Open any fashion magazine or newspaper and weaves get ample play. Designers up and down the country extol the virtues of weaves, proudly brandishing their innovative work with weavers to contemporise motifs and palettes. This is laudable but hardly surprising.
Technologies Of Elegance
As soon as you enter the exhibition space in Bikaner House, the display ahead sort of takes your breath away. It’s a carefully crafted mise-enscène, filled with dangling screens, suspended sequins, overflowing jewellery boxes, glass displays, and more. And yet, in spite of the exquisite setting, and the props that inhabit it, your focus never wavers from the clothes, which form the essence of the exhibition.
A Writer's Discourse
There are two moments in Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus that I come back to often. The first is an epitaph that Socrates uses to explain bad writing, which he recites (and I will now quote) in full:
The Smuggler: A Mural By Sadequain
The story goes that Sadequain (1930 – 1987), living in Karachi, was exhausted and in poor health. He was offered a stay at a government rest house at Gadani in 1958, so that he could recover. Gadani is located in the province of Balochistan on the Arabian Sea, a few kilometers west of Karachi. It must have felt quite remote from the city back then. The western coastline of Pakistan has long been infamous for underdevelopment and for unregulated trade activities with West Asia.
Ghosts Of Ghan-Town
Landing gracefully on a rock, the camel tucked in its wings And wondered if this was perhaps Miryam Springs? This parched and desolate landscape was not what he hoped to find What of the flourishing settlement he had once left behind?
Kerala Boy
The Kerala boy stands alone, facing the sea or what looks like the sea. Water is never far from his feet. His eyes are dark and his hair is blacker than the best Tellicherry pepper. He is an inch taller than most and a little long in the tooth. He likes the language of protest. He likes the flavour of a season called ‘Left’.
Fictioning The Landscape: Robert Smithson And Ruins In Reverse
That zero panorama seemed to contain ruins in reverse, that is – all the new construction that would eventually be built. This is the opposite of the ‘romantic ruin’ because the buildings don’t fall into ruin after they are built but rather rise into ruin before they are built. –Robert Smithson, “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey”
