What is the purpose of a legal system? The great schism of twentieth-century legal thought is between those who would have it that the principles of fairness and natural justice necessarily underpin legal structures, and those who would say that they are completely separate. If you believe in natural justice, you might say that things like slavery were so morally unconscionable that they were not really ever valid as laws in the first place. You might well cast the actions of the British Empire in such a category, although the East India Company was in existence for over 300 years, and it was entirely supported by the legal systems and processes and bureaucracy that were developing, in their modern forms, contemporaneously with it. In order to hold steady for so long, the Empire required an enormous amount of structure, process and a fetishisation of that type of manila-enveloped, rubber-stamped administrative function so distinctive that it almost becomes its own kind of kitsch. It’s precisely those legal structures which propped up the Empire that concealed the extent of its violence under thick and opaque layers of bureaucracy.
It is fitting, therefore, that the Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes (CICC) uses precisely these legal and bureaucratic structures to reflect the crimes of colonial actors like the East India Company back onto them. The CICC is simultaneously a conceptual artwork, constituted as a ‘court’, and also a piece of functional pedagogy and critical analysis – their work exists within these legal structures, and calls upon knowledgeable and expert ‘witnesses’ to intergenerational climate crimes. At Blenheim Walk Gallery, Leeds Arts University, the CICC presents an exhibition centred around a film showing the court in action across various hearings. The film is surrounded by large lightboxes depicting images of plants and leaves. It turns out the plants here are crucial to the intergenerational crimes under investigation.
The CICC is an ongoing conceptual project founded by Radha D’Souza and Jonas Staal. Since 2021, they have been staging immersive installations in various locations around the world, operating like a functioning court, bringing quasi-prosecutions for crimes against the climate committed by states and corporations. It operates by calling expert witnesses to ‘hearings’, which address historic, present and even future crimes, reflecting the interconnected and intergenerational nature of climate crime, and the way that colonisation of ecological systems and communities both extends backwards into the past and forwards into the future. Previous events have organised hearings against Unilever, Airbus, and various nation states. In Leeds, the exhibition was opened with an event hosting an inaugural evidentiary hearing, presenting a case against the East India Company.
At Blenheim Walk Gallery, the CICC’s exhibition features a film of significant past hearings of the court. We take our place within the circle and watch the proceedings unfold like a courtroom drama in real time, preserving the feel of a genuine legal case. Witnesses who are variously academics, experts, and members of communities with lived experience of these crimes take the stand to testify against colonial bodies. Those offering testimony are not limited to human actors either; non-human agents, in this case plants that played a pivotal role in the growth of empire, are also named as witnesses. The exhibition’s circular installation of lightboxes surrounds the viewer with images of some of these plants – plants that are central to the climate crimes under discussion. (For example, indigo production was accelerated in India under colonial rule, taking up space that would’ve been better used for rice, making communities more vulnerable to famine.) In British legal jargon, the term ‘fig leaf’ is sometimes used to describe the situation where legal courts cover up the source of their own power; for example, by pretending that they are simply enforcing the intentions of a democratically elected Parliament, when in fact judges are systematically applying their own principles and value judgements to make law. It’s one example of how legal bureaucracy and the carefully constructed fictions of the legal system can be used to obscure the true structures of power. Here, it is literal leaves and botanical specimens that surround us, as though bearing witness to the actions of the Empire.
The witnesses that the CICC calls across the hearings presented here bring an expertise and a clear-sighted overview. They make it obvious that the East India Company, although legally long disbanded, paved the way for modern capitalism, and that companies like Unilever also have clear and traceable roots in colonial structures. CICC’s film on display in the gallery also discusses the legal fiction of the abolition of slavery and its legacy, and how systems like indentured labour were, in law, formally abolished in 1917 but in practice, really weren’t. The court presents evidence to show how these morally unconscionable systems were abolished on technicalities, in name only, but essentially just incorporated seamlessly into capitalism’s own structures.
By presenting evidence in a clear-eyed, quasi-legal way, calling on experts from many fields, the CICC’s work helps the viewer to see the true intergenerational nature of climate crime. We are also invited to question our understanding of right and wrong and what constitutes a crime in the first place. For while the Empire painstakingly created a whole theatre of legal structures by which it was able to sustain itself, the concept of ecological crime or climate crime and ecocide is not something that it would’ve recognised as valid. However, the CICC’s work shows the extent to which the host communities and ecosystems, and the indigenous people whose lands were colonised, would absolutely have understood the concept of climate and ecological crime. For generations, those communities worked with the plants and the ecosystems that were destroyed by the actions of the East India Company. By drawing on intergenerational, international and non-human witnesses, the CICC is able to do something that the legal structures of the British Empire could not – it is able to construct an accurate picture of the worlds that were dismantled and ruined in the name of the Empire and nascent capitalism.
The law is so often a space of theatre, of fictions and constructed concepts. At times, it’s maybe more artful than art itself. There’s a wry irony to the fact that by aping the dry, rigid systems and processes of legal practice, the CICC constructs something inherently theatrical and dramatic. It’s through being true to the nature of a trial and a legal hearing, while introducing concepts from art and philosophy like intergenerational crime and non-human agency, that the CICC is able to expose impressively the limits of the legal imaginary, its wilful blindness, its inability to see back and forwards through time and space. As an ongoing conceptual art project, and a body of work, D’Souza and Staal have created something here that is not only functional as a moral and ethical court, but also something that engages with our own complicity in pretending that the law is indeed underpinned by principles of natural justice and fairness. Just ask the rhizomes and the indigo leaves, and they’ll tell you a different story.
Tessa Norton is a writer and artist based in Saltaire, West Yorkshire
Radha D’Souza and Jonas Staal, Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes: The British East India Company on Trial is on at Blenheim Walk Gallery, Leeds Arts University, 31 October 2025 – 31 January 2026.
This review is supported by Leeds Arts University.
Published 08.12.2025 by Benjamin Barra in Reviews
1,305 words
