The symposium is on occasion of the exhibition Edgelanders: Amsterdam on Trial / Part III: The Witnesses. Through the multi-part project, artists Ehsan Fardjadniya and Raul Balai are building material for a people’s tribunal against the city of Amsterdam in relation to the right to housing for undocumented people.

During the symposium we ask a set of questions together through the lenses of different projects including Edgelanders: If the state fails to act in accordance with justice and human rights, where do we (documented and undocumented) seek justice? Why is the state not acting in accordance with the justice systems put in place? And what are the limits of law? Where do we go for truth-telling and reconciliation? How can we make the state accountable? How can people's tribunals effect broader social and political change, including policy reforms, advocacy campaigns, and grassroots mobilisation? How can we center the voices of the ones who experience oppression in the processes of justice?

Artists have been engaging with the form of People’s Tribunals in different ways, as art works, whether processual or performative but also as active members of tribunals. There is an array of forms of People’s Tribunals, this gathering is geared towards learning from each other”s experiences and sharing with the audience various ways of engaging art in the work of social justice. It is primarily an assembly to help Raul and Ehsan think through the process towards the tribunal, and open a discussion about this form of justice with artists and the general public.

Participants are Pim Fischer (lawyer), Tineke Strik (politician), Robin Vanbesien (with his recent project Hold on to Her), Gable Roelofsen (The Shell Trials), Sami Tsegaye (We Are Here collective), Nilab Ahmadi (city councillor) and Ehsan Fardjadniya and Raul Balai (artists).

The symposium will take place at de Appel (Tolstraat 160) and Cinetol (nextdoor at Tolstraat 182). The symposium will be in English, except for the discussion between Pim Fischer and Tineke Strik, which will be in Dutch.

hold on to her (exhibition version) traces a lived social infrastructure of care, solidarity and struggle, addressing a recent case of police and state violence in Belgium. Mawda Shawri, two years old in 2018, sister of Hama, daughter of Phrast and Shamden, was shot dead by a Belgian police officer during a migration border control. In 2023, over 40 people, both undocumented and documented resident activists, assembled before the camera at La Voix des Sans Papiers in Brussels to stage a collective hearing of documents from and reactions to Mawda’s case. During this gathering, the speakers acknowledge a ghostly haunting, caused by the impunity of the police and the lack of accountability of the state. It is in their refusal of such a lack of truth and human rights that they feel the need to explore beyond the official narratives. They produce the counter evidence of this deadly crossing, and they practice justice as a sensuous social space for collective mourning and healing. Faced with the inability to proceed within the dominant frameworks, this hearing challenges what is visible and audible, supported by Vanbesien’s audiovisual grammar, which foregrounds the opaque and the poetic.

The Shell Trial is based on the play The Shell Case by Rebekka de Wit and Anoek Nuyens, which premiered in 2020 and was very popular on Dutch and international stages. Directing duo Romy Roelofsen and Gable Roelofsen, together with co-creator and conductor Manoj Kamps, took the initiative to adapt this play for the opera stage, in order to bring the theme to the attention of an even larger audience. They asked librettist Roxie Perkins and composer Ellen Reid to make this challenging translation with them. The Shell case continued to form the starting point, but in their opera adaptation the climate crisis is presented not only as a current problem, but also as a problem with a long-running colonial history. The addition of extra voices, which are often not heard in the debate, express this extra layer. There is The Historian, who creates space for the voices of history, and The Climate Refugee, which represents the voice of those who have had to flee their country at the hands of companies such as Shell. In this way, The Shell Trial is a plea for jointly looking ahead, with attention to the history that has brought us to this point.