The session will examine people’s tribunals and other grassroots initiatives that function as a ‘theatre of justice and truth’: assemblies staged to assert authority over justice, thereby counteracting the legal violence exercised by the state and its apparatus.
Image gallery
Bodies_of_Law_05.11.2026
In examining these collective acts of coming together, which serve the pursuit of truth, the session will explore alternative models of justice that operate beyond official legal frameworks and are characterised by their performative and embodied dimensions.
The evening consists of two parts:
a lecture entitled ‘People’s Trials as Counter-Forums’ with Başak Ertür, a critical legal scholar, lecturer at the Centre for Research Architecture and Research Fellow at Forensic Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work examines legal violence, the performativity of law, and, more broadly, legal epistemologies and aesthetics (see her monograph: ‘Spectacles and Specters: A Performative Theory of Political Trials’, Fordham University Press, 2022).
Following her lecture, the film “hold on to her” (2024, 80 minutes), directed by Robin Vanbesien, will be screened. The film addresses a recent case involving police and state power in the context of migration and border controls in Belgium.
In 2018, Mawda Shawri was shot dead by a Belgian police officer during a car chase on a major motorway. “hold on to her” traces a lived social infrastructure of care, solidarity and the struggle for justice.
Dates
November 2026
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