Arts and Human Rights

Since its inception, and most recently in the context of its 30th anniversary, CEJIL has developed a sensitivity for exploring the connections between the arts and human rights. In its work as a guarantor and promoter of fundamental rights and justice at the regional level, CEJIL has connected diverse artistic expressions with strategic litigation, advocacy, and communication.

The situation of human rights defenders, the climate and environmental crisis, the defense of territory, human mobility, international justice, and gender violence are some of the issues to which CEJIL has contributed from the perspective of international law along with the interpretations of artists. Our contribution to this hybrid relationship has translated into documentation, symbolic reparations, generation of memory, resignification of spaces, as well as new interdisciplinary forms of prevention, promotion, and protection of human rights.

WRITING AND LISTENING AS A FORM OF REMEMBERING

Through the voices of renowned writers, artists, and singers from the Latin American region, CEJIL finds a powerful way of transforming pain through words. Focusing on some emblematic and historical cases, CEJIL works with artists, to the sound of their interpretation, to reflect on gender violence, assassinations, forced disappearances, and other serious human rights violations.

The results are written pieces for the legal cases of the Colombian journalist Jineth Bedoya Lima, the Mexican activist Digna Ochoa, the crimes committed during the seizure of the Colombian courthouse, the kidnapping and murder Marco Antonio Molina Theissen in Guatemala, and the case of the nine students and a professor of La Cantuta University in Peru.

Artists:

INTERSECTIONS:CONVERSATIONS WITH ARTISTS

CEJIL talked with the artists Fernando Bryce and Marcelo Brodsky about the importance of some of the individuals included in their recent work “Territorios”, which showcases the work and lives of 10 activists murdered in Latin America. We were able to exchange ideas with the painters about the cases of Marielle Franco from Brazil, Berta Cáceres from Honduras, Hugo Torres from Nicaragua, and Myrna Mack from Guatemala. These were all cases that CEJIL represented and each of these activisits was incorporated into their artwork. The piece is the result of the artists’ residency at El Espacio 23, Jorge M. Pérez’s contemporary art space in Miami.

Both Bryce and Brodsky seek to create an intersection between social and environmental justice and the denunciation art and photojournalism. In dialogues such as this one, with both artists, CEJIL recognizes an opportunity through art to complement the work and memory of human rights defenders in the region. CEJIL also believes in the value of contributing to the dissemination of the piece “Territorios” so that it can transcend activism, as a form of advocacy for the defense of rights and the protection of democracy.

Artists:

ILLUSTRATE AND COMMEMORATE

To commemorate the 30th anniversary of our work, we decided to work with Latin American artists to highlight, through illustrations, some of the cases that CEJIL has accompanied. The pieces, which represent the stories of victims whose human rights were violated, invite us to think about the various challenges facing Latin American societies and the logic of defending rights in order to change these realities.

Artists: