Visualizing Law and Justice at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia

Abstract

The body is falling backwards, facing the sky. The hands are clasped together in a sampeah, as if in greeting, as if in prayer. For the artist of the Cambodian Tragedy Memorial, also called A ceux qui ne sont plus là (For those who are no longer here), the body “speak[s] both to and beyond individual identity.” By standing both as personal testimony of loss and “in memory of the Cambodian genocide and its impossible representation,” the memorial raises longstanding questions on the authority and limits of testimony, on representation, and, importantly for this symposium, on the relation between art and international criminal law.

The Bangsokol Requiem, affective intensification, and memory activation

“… 8. As Maria Elander argues of this case, art works do far more than simply ‘complete the law’ (Elander, 2020: 130). A modified version of the sculpture was eventually made and installed in a central city park but soon removed.…”

Introduction to the Symposium on Art, Aesthetics, and International Courts

“…La Trobe Law School's Maria Elander, in her contribution to the symposium, provides a masterful exposition of the intricacies and controversies associated with one of the first instances of creative reparations in the field: the sculpture For those who are no longer here accepted as a form of reparation at the ECCC to commemorate personal and collective loss resulting from the Cambodian genocide. 19 Another way to challenge traditional static understandings of international justice through the lens of aesthetics is to see the process of international adjudication as a collective endeavor generating commonly shared reality. This viewpoint is a sociological way to challenge dominant static conceptualizations of international justice in general, and the work of international courts in particular.…”