KOOZ Nina, you are an architect and PhD candidate in Law. Could you tell us a bit more about what prompted this interest in Law, following your formal training as an architect?

Nina Valerie Kolowratnik (NVK) Thank you for this interview. In fact, my interest in human rights started from within my architectural education, which from early on directed my focus to forced displacement, stages of migration and refugee return, the difficulties of creating home and the relationship to territory. I ended my master’s in architecture with a thesis on imagining and mapping out a return of Palestinian refugees to today’s Israel, focusing on projecting memories of home into a present that has been violently changed through the Zionist movement – a project of genocide against the Palestinian peoples that started in 1948 and of which we are currently witnessing another incredibly violent chapter in Gaza.

Later, teaching projects allowed me to continue focusing on the Middle East region, trying to understand and communicate Syrian and Afghani refugees’ experiences of flight and arrival in Jordan, Turkey, Greece, and Austria through mapping. Because of my interest in Native American legal efforts to safeguard and regain traditional land in the United States, and in the framework of my studies in Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices in Architecture at Columbia GSAPP, I started a long-term project on evidence production and cultural secrecy within the then ongoing Jemez Pueblo land claim, which, on request of the pueblo, ended advising the legal team on spatial notation.

KOOZ Specifically, you are part of the European Research Council advanced grant project ‘DISSECT: Evidence in International Human Rights Adjudication’ and your doctoral studies focus on Indigenous peoples’ knowledge at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. In what ways does the Western legal framework purposefully exclude alternative forms of truth and knowledge transfer?

NVK In many Western-oriented legal fora, indigenous truths — based on their concepts of cosmovision and lived realities — are not accepted as eligible proof. Even though the connection to traditional lands often represents a key aspect to be proven in territorial cases, what Western-oriented judicial systems consider reliable is mostly limited to empirical facts. Oral histories — the primary method of knowledge production and transmission within most Native communities — are often reduced to hearsay status, and remain unheard, as they can’t be evaluated according to Western scientific standards. When, on rare occasions, indigenous peoples are asked to appear on the witness stand, oral testimony in court is often limited to just one person explaining what has happened to them. It misses the traditional structure in which Indigenous communities typically give their oral accounts, such as rhythmic chant, song, or dance. Further, Western court settings disregard the traditional rules of information sharing, which determine, by reference to traditional hierarchies, who is allowed to speak about certain information. In this context, when the terms of the legal representation of Indigenous sovereign communities and their truths are dictated by the dominant society’s national government, or supranational Western-oriented courts, it can only be regarded as a colonial act. We must provide equal access to justice and in indigenous cases, this means allowing indigenous truths and its representation formats into the courtroom.

KOOZ A pivotal case was that of Pueblo Indígena Kichwa de Sarayaku vs Ecuador (2012) in which the Sarayaku people filed against the exploitation of oil fields by the General Fuel Company (CGC) — a case they won in the Inter-American Court. Could you tell us a bit more about this case and what it represents for other Indigenous communities facing similar threats?

NVK The 2012 sentence of the Inter-American Court in favour of the Sarayaku peoples followed a decade-long legal battle that the Sarayaku have been fighting since a foreign oil company was allowed, by the Ecuadorian government in the 1990s, to encroach on their traditional lands in the Amazon rainforest, without any process of consultation or consent from the community. For the Sarayaku community, oil exploitation activity on their traditional territory meant militarisation and violence, environmental destruction, and loss of elements of their culture. Choosing the legal path to fight back extractivist industries on their lands over a violent response, the Sarayaku people became examples of organization, social cohesion, and determination and encouraged many indigenous communities facing similar threats to resist as well. The ruling of the Inter-American Court found that Ecuador had violated the right to free, prior and informed consent, setting a mandatory precedent for the countries in the Organization of American States.

KOOZ One of the main problems within these cases is language and the lack thereof, within the Western framework, of certain vocabularies and structures of thought. In 2019 you published The Language of Secret Proof: Indigenous Truth and Representation, advocating for the urgent need for alternative modes of evidentiary production.
How did you approach the very fact that notation runs counter to the structural organisation of these communities, which rely on and around oral history and cultural secrecy? What is the potential of this notation in bridging the language gap between Native truths and Western legal forums?

NVK In collaboration with members from the Jemez Pueblo, we tried to approach the dilemma of producing evidentiary documents in a context of secrecy, by developing a notational system that adopts the conceptual structure of oral history. Oral history is a knowledge transmission format traditionally used within cultures defined by secrecy and, indeed, represents an integral part in maintaining secrecy. Similar to the main linguistic structuring element of oral history — the metaphor — the drawings we produced work as speech images. While, to a legal audience, the only “accessible” components of the drawings are the encrypted representations–which, in fact, provide the proof, perhaps paradoxically, of secret knowledge, Jemez members’ ability to link individual traditional knowledge to the spatial notations allows them to “complete” the “blank” spaces of the drawings, to decipher them. Like the concept of oral history, each member will link traditional knowledge to the drawing, to an extent available to them personally and as part of their cultural community.

What these drawings were able to do is to communicate on two different levels. We created a “coded” visual narrative that could be fully read by the Jemez but kept the secret from the public. Including certain empirical elements of no concern to the tribe — such as the already-recorded locations of archeological sites — the publicly legible information provided some information that was easy to process by the court. Most interesting about these drawings is that they represent indigenous truths but only communicate them in part. They suggest cultural secrecy as part of legal language.

KOOZ Within the exhibition Intangible Proof at MAGAZIN, you highlight — through video, sound, and mapping — the difficulties of bringing the values of Indigenous peoples to a Western-oriented court. Specifically, you bring our attention to how spatial mapping techniques can enable the understanding and visualisation of Tagaeri Taromenane territorialities. What is the potential of visualising and representing the intangible?

NVK The Tagaeri Taromenane are among the last indigenous peoples remaining in isolation in the Ecuadorian Amazon, without contact with the majority population. However, the expansion of oil extraction and logging activities in their territory has led to the drastic reduction of their land. Three massacres against the Tagaeri and Taromenane (in the years 2003, 2006, and 2013) and the failure of the state of Ecuador to protect these people are now the focus of a legal case against Ecuador, carried out before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. While the victims remain as an isolated community, those who brought the case to court — namely three individual petitioners later joined by the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities in Ecuador (CONAIE), the environmental activist organisation YASunidos and a young Taromenane woman brought up in a neighbouring tribe — are faced with the incredibly difficult task of procuring evidence in their absence. Having performed an ethnography on the petitioners’ legal team, a central question I am researching in my PhD has become how to prove the intangible.

Since the case revolves around protecting the Tagaeri Taromenane territory and their lives from encroaching extractivist industries, any form of spatial visualisation of their traditional territory might present a potential danger and point of forced contact. Since the community is not only living in isolation but also nomadic, delineating protective areas on a static map —like the “zona intangible” established by the Ecuadorian state in 1999 — has already proved not to be a viable approach. The massacres showed that the community had already moved outside the protected area, and neither the oil nor logging industry respected the safe zone. Anthropologists working in the area warn that overflights of helicopters and drones are way too invasive and must be avoided at all costs. The lead anthropologist of the legal team Roberto Narvaez acknowledges that no one can know with certainty how the Tagaeri Taromenane define their traditional territory. However, we do know from the neighbouring Waorani tribe that the foreign noise produced by illegal loggers, the operation of oil pits, and vehicles on the newly constructed roads represent a severe threat to the Tagaeri Taromenane. One way to visualise the Tagaeri Taromenane case might therefore involve, rather than mapping the “boundaries” of a traditional territory, mapping those new harsh boundaries created by foreign and violent soundscapes that make the rainforest uninhabitable. In the exhibition I show a first attempt to visualise these new and expanding sound boundaries.

KOOZ Can the architectural tool-box be an alternative vocabulary which works towards the decolonisation of our language?

NVK I do believe that with architecture education should come a special sensitivity on how to relate to space and represent these dialogic relationships (physical/mental, private/social, environmental/relational space). Activating this tool-box in a human rights context, thereby challenging some of its language, is a way in which architects might be able to contribute.

KOOZ Addressing the host institution now, what role do cultural spaces like MAGAZIN hold in terms of disseminating such research?

MAGAZIN Since its foundation in 2018, MAGAZIN has been devoted to exhibiting a broad spectrum of distinct architectural positions often ignored and underrepresented by the discipline’s mainstream. With our curatorial programme, we try to provide more visibility to projects that are clearly situated outside the range of commercial architectural production and encourage the further development of these researches by funding the production of new work. Intangible Proof — and the work of Nina in general — is a good example of a spatial practice that pushes the boundaries of a normative understanding of the profession. It shows how the architectural tools at hand can be made productive for valuable purposes in different and highly crucial contexts.

Bio

Nina Kolowratnik is an architect and PhD candidate in Law within the Human Rights Center of Ghent University in Belgium, where she is part of the European Research Council advanced grant project ‘DISSECT: Evidence in International Human Rights Adjudication’. Her doctoral study focuses on Indigenous peoples’ knowledge at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the impact of the Court’s evidentiary regime on access to justice and knowledge representation. She’s the author of the book The Language of Secret Proof: Indigenous Truth and Representation (Sternberg Press, 2019).

MAGAZIN is an exhibition space for contemporary architecture in Vienna. It was founded in March 2018 and is currently run by Jerome Becker and Matthias Moroder. MAGAZIN presents the work of local and international architects in solo exhibitions that are especially conceived for the spaces in the Rembrandtstraße location – framed by corresponding publications and lectures.

Federica Zambeletti is the founder and managing director of KoozArch. She is an architect, researcher and digital curator whose interests lie at the intersection between art, architecture and regenerative practices. In 2015 Federica founded KoozArch with the ambition of creating a space where to research, explore and discuss architecture beyond the limits of its built form. Parallel to her work at KoozArch, Federica is Architect at the architecture studio UNA and researcher at the non-profit agency for change UNLESS where she is project manager of the research "Antarctic Resolution". Federica is an Architectural Association School of Architecture in London alumni.