by Dagmara Genda // June 10, 2025
This article is part of our feature topic Legality.
The judicial system is both intimidating and beguiling—a complex web of ritualized procedures enacted in hallowed, semi-public chambers, administered by (mostly) men dressed in long black or red robes. In our video call, artist and academic Susan Schuppli likens it to a “dramaturgy,” a “choreopolitics” whose workings are highly coded and whose justice is all too often unevenly distributed. Though she is critical of the “legal imagination,” it is not something she explicitly works against, as much as questions and, in a supplementary gesture, works parallel to. She examines and speculates on what techniques of justice, evidence and witnessing might mean from different perspectives, above all an ecological one.
This is where the concept of the “material witness”—also the title of a book she wrote in 2020—comes in. With this concept, she presents matter as not just evidence, but as a non-human agent that can testify to a particular event. The material witness is fundamentally changed by an event—traumatized, if you will—and these changes can be read, like the rings of a tree or geological strata, within the body of the material itself. A concern with the stuff and life of matter also lies at the heart of art. When Schuppli cites the “technicity of materials,” she, as I see it, is speaking to the age-old concern with form. The form of law, with its concepts and techniques, becomes the lens through which new “affective relationships,” a term Schuppli uses in ‘Material Witness,’ with the non-human world are framed. What could it mean, for example, to consider the “rights” of a tree or a glacier, even if these rights cannot, and perhaps should not, be represented in a court of law? This expanded engagement with the environment, not as a resource but as another “I” that can be heard, lies at the crux of Schuppli’s continued work. Just as our second video call abruptly cuts off, she tells me she increasingly prefers doing field work with small groups of students and affected communities. I suppose it is there that hearing and listening happens directly, as opposed to the often diffuse presentations of the art world.
Susan Schuppli, dir.: ‘Moving Ice,’ 2024, 4K colour & sound, 48:39 mins // Courtesy of the artist
Dagmara Genda: When and how did you start to deal with juridical systems in your practice?
Susan Schuppli: It happened when I started working with Forensic Architecture, even though certain case studies that made their way into ‘Material Witness’ were already present in my PhD dissertation. Particularly influential in this respect was the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia, a complex set of legal proceedings that lasted well over 20 years. In following various cases, I was struck by how photographs were debated and presented as well as assumed to be neutral depictions of reality. That said, they were often only used as visual aids for witness testimony. But when they appeared in court they were frequently reproduced, cropped, marked up, with little to no discussion about their probity or the integrity of their metadata.
DG: Their authenticity was not cleared up before they were allowed into the court as evidence?
SS: Generally, no. However General Ratko Mladić’s notebooks were subject to examination by the Netherlands Forensic Institute, even though he had already confirmed they were his. Photographs and other visual media presented during the Tribunal, on the other hand, were often just assumed to be objective windows into reality needing no further verification. That’s probably changing now with the advent of deep fakes. ‘Material Witness’ would be a different book if written today.
DG: Because of deep fakes?
SS: Not only deep fakes and the widespread availability of evidential materials derived from social media, but I would focus on a series of more directly interlinked contemporary case studies. I’d also write it with a stronger orientation towards other forms of accountability, such as a justice-based frameworks, rather than legal. When you look at the successful litigation of environmental contaminates and harms that have produced adverse health effects in human populations, these are often cases where people have been monitored for well over a decade. Do all of these communities have to wait 10 to 20 years for recognition and reparations because the legal regime takes that long to produce unequivocal chains of causality between the actions of polluters and impacts upon the well-being of communities?
‘Scenographies of Power: from the State of Exception to the Spaces of Exception,’ 2017, exhibition view at La Casa Encendida, curated by Maite Borjabad López-Pastor // Photo © Maria Eugenia Serrano, 2017
DG: Can creative practice offer something in the development of new juridical concepts or models? I understood your videos, for example, as a means of giving the material witness a platform, maybe even setting the ground for ideas like the “rights of nature.”
SS: I am not a particular advocate of that discourse because, at the end of the day, a tree or animal will not go into a court of law, in the same way that children also do not (typically) testify in a court of law. Those entities and their claims will ultimately need to be mediated through their legal representatives. But I think this has been an important conceptual framework for expanding the concept of rights and thus potential modes of restitution and reparations, without recourse to a form of legal recognition.
That said, every art project I produce is indeed concerned with material witnessing. The documentary sensibility of the works also plays a role in that. But, to be honest, I am not sure I have entirely succeeded in allowing the material to narrate or express its own dynamic conditions. This is because I am always using a lot of specialized technology to access the properties of materials, to tease out certain types of aesthetic attributes, or tune into certain frequencies that otherwise may not be audible to human beings. There is a lot of technical mediation involved in making multi-layered audio-visual tracks that can operate as evidential agents or registers within my projects.
DG: How has your research into the law affected how you engage with material?
SS: I think what has affected my practice is not the protocols and the rule-based imagination of the law, but rather questions of testimony and who or what has the capacity to speak, or, rather, to be heard and paid attention to.
For example, with the work we were doing in Ladakh, as part of ‘Listening to Ice’ (2023), the term climate change was not necessarily mentioned by locals, but their stories about the bears coming down from the mountains earlier each spring clearly reflected such events. Likewise the folk songs collected by an elderly musician (Morup Namgyal) we met in Leh, which recount stories of mountains, lakes, rivers and streams, all carry knowledge of climate systems and their changes and so can also testify to the environmental changes taking place around them.
I suppose it is an awareness of a particular legal imagination, including the violence that it can inflict, that informed an intrinsic dimension of much of my early work, which also led me to shift my focus more explicitly towards ecological subjects. This is not to say that these are immune from such considerations but rather that the legal is now much more part of the overall context than the specific subject of the works. And while people may talk about my practice in relation to Forensic Architecture, I actually have a lot more creative license to narrate and tell stories. I shoot my own footage, make my own field recordings, I use proxies to stand in for shots that I’m missing, and also use a lot of archival footage. I don’t have to account for every decision I make in terms of the probity of my material assemblies, because the product is not destined for a court of law, where it may be cross-examined.
I guess I would say that I am interested in the “technicity” of materials. In this sense, I am more engaged with the technicity of the law and the technicity of media and environmental systems. Even the artworks that I made that were explicitly legal were still more directed towards studying the court as a legal artefact of a certain kind of technical or rule-based imagination.
DG: The high quality of the video and audio you now make made me think about your discussion of poor quality recordings in ‘Material Witness,’ and what the quality of a record can also reveal about an event. Your last two projects are filled with so much high resolution, haptic imagery that they depart from the didactic sensibility so present in your previous works.
SS: When I first started the ‘Learning from Ice’ research project I had been renting equipment but this quickly became very expensive so I decided it was finally time to buy my own kit again. I bought a video camera and a number of cine prime lenses. You get an almost thicker kind of image with this kind of fixed focal lens, because it is taking in so much information. Working with these lenses, especially my 50mm has allowed me to come closer to the material in a way that has been quite productive.
When I was filming in the Canadian Ice Core Archive, I was shooting in the lab where the scientists do their routine, oftentimes tedious, work with ice. Yet our cameras managed to capture aspects of the space that transformed it into something else, something quite magical and unfamiliar. When the scientists later saw their place of work through our eyes, our technological eyes, they were very enthralled with what they saw. They had never seen their space of work like that before. For the final edit, I worked with a composer to produce an electronic score in order to enter into the internal life of ice—to suggest that the ice was not a mute and silent witness waiting for its eventual technical resuscitation, but that it was strangely alive. I use repeating sonic signatures as clues to signal the importance of a certain events. Music has always been a useful way of denaturalizing the image-track for me.
DG: It’s interesting that the newer camera and lenses give the impression of somehow coming closer to the material at hand, because they have so much more technology in them that corrects and stabilizes images. Sometimes they seem hyperreal, even computer-generated. Do you get that sense as well?
SS: Yeah, at times, for sure. A student of ours is researching tracking surveillance in migrant detention centres in Greece. With the Sony G Master lens system that I use, you can lock focus on up to 10 people and have the camera track them in a large crowd. This operational logic is not coming from the genealogy of cinema but from surveillance cultures and applications in policing.
Susan Schuppli, dir., view of Svalsat Ground Station from ‘[Climate] Signals from Svalbard,’ 2024, 27:34 mins // Courtesy of the artist
DG: One last question: because the works have a didactic function, it seems their reach should be wider than just a biennial or an exhibition. Do you disseminate them in other ways?
SS: They also get screened in a lot of educational environments. The scientists who collaborated with me also screen the films at their conferences and other meetings, since I always share everything with them. I imagine the works may get re-edited or shown as clips, but that’s fine with me.
I have increasingly been doing more field work, as well as running sound-based workshops with young people and affected communities. This sort of direct engagement is becoming an ever more important, and enjoyable, aspect of my practice.
