Speech Extractions  Witness, Testimony, Evidence in response to the Mining Industry

Film Screenings: 4pm–9pm Thursday 20 October  

Conference: 9am–9pm Friday 21 October 2016 

Conference Keynote Lecture by Professor Aviva Chomsky: 6.30pm Friday 21 October 2016 

This event, organized between the Bartlett and public engagement partner, the London Mining Network, is a voicing of displacements, dispossessions and environmental disasters that have occurred in responses to the activities of the extractive industries. 

Following J. L Austin’s seminal 1955 lecture series ‘How to do Things with Words?’ in which he discusses the performative capacity of language, these spoken words can be understood as reality-producing and thus as capable of constructing alternative worlds; and as ‘perlocutionary acts’ in which certain effects are achieved by saying something. The words spoken will be considered in terms of issues of evidence, witnessing, and testimony connected with human rights and environmental justice. Speakers come from communities in Colombia, Brazil and Indonesia, legal associations, NGOs, and universities. 

Professor Aviva Chomsky (Salem State University, Massachusetts) has been visiting communities in La Guajira, Colombia and other central American countries, with Witness for Peace for more than 10 years. She is author Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal (2014); A History of the Cuban Revolution (2010); Linked Labor Histories: New England, Colombia, and the Making of a Global Working Class (2008) and co-editor with Garry Leech and Steve Striffler of The People Behind Colombian Coal/Bajo el manto del carbon (2007). 

Download the programme

Film screening: 4pm-9pm Thursday 20 October 2016

4.00 La Buena Vida (The Good Life), Jens Schanze – Writer, Director and Producer. (2015) 

6.00 The Wrong Neighbour, Jose Alvear Restrepo Lawyers’ Collective (CAJAR). (2016)

6.50 El Río que se Robaron (The River that they Stole), Gonzalo Guillen. (2015)  

8.10 Valley of Dead River, Marcelo Bichara – Director, Editor and Producer. (2016)

• Funded by the Bartlett ‘Sea and Currents Fund’ and the London Mining Network.